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A gateway to the global city: Mobile place-making practices by expats

Drawing from ethnographic research of expatriates who use meetup.com and similar digitally based social organizing platforms to access events in Paris, this paper explores how on- and offline meet-up rhetoric and routines contribute to the production of a mobile “sense of place” for people who have relocated or traveled alone. By highlighting how participants may use digital media to create a sense of belonging to an “international community” extendable across a series of local places, this research diverges from earlier studies that have focused on how migrants use media to maintain connections to a “homeland” or to reconstitute the home abroad. Although the paper celebrates new agencies afforded by mobile place-making, particularly for women, I suggest that as professional labor trends increasingly assert the value of placeless-ness, tools that combine communication with location-based digital organizing will only grow in importance and the “support” provided by them should be continually interrogated.