Russian-Speaking “Migrant YouTube” as a Focus of Urban and Social Studies

Abstract

In the Russian-speaking YouTube segment, there is a large number of channels whose authors, coming to the Russian Federation from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, publish the scenes of their everyday life in the host country: searching for a job, furnishing an apartment, meeting migration services and police officers, relationships with other migrants. These videos and comments to them describe the migration experience of the author and reflect the reaction of other migrants and host society representatives to their opinions. Such digital platforms are more than just venues for experience exchange and accumulation of social capital between the migrants;they are a meeting pointfor “us” and “them”, the conventional migrants and the locals. The specificity of the digital platform and its daily life blog focus allows us to suppose that the studies of the “migrant channels” are an opportunity to see Russian cities through the eyes of the foreign labourers. At the same time, the “migrant segment” of the Russian-speaking YouTube has hardly ever been described. The objective of the article is to partially fill this gap by categorizing the “migrant YouTube” channels selected with the snowball principle based on the retrospective online observation method, to assess their heuristic potential for further thorough sociological and anthropological studies of migration, and, if possible, to formulate several hypotheses on the social functions on the “migrant YouTube”