Paper short abstract:

The paper will use the concepts of improvisation and aestheticisation to explore how Northern Irish Indian families mediate relationships with absent people, places and the Divine.

Paper long abstract:

Aestheticisation and Improvisation: Encountering 'Absence' in Indian Diasporic Settings

In this paper, improvisation is regarded as a creative process of engagement with both far-away people/places and the distant Divine. Based on research focused on first and second generation Indians in Northern Ireland, the paper will explore how members of Diasporic families mediate and encounter absence in dynamic and sometimes playful processes of aestheticisation, conceptualised as a process by which people interpret particular sensorial experiences as valuable and worthwhile. The analysis will also investigate to what extent 'vision', as one of the senses central to aestheticisation through material culture, can be regarded as mode of care and control. Weibel's notion of religion as 'medium of absence' will also be applied to analyse the particularities of specific diasporic transnational and spiritual encounters, for example through photographs, souvenirs, religious artefacts, works of art and digital imagery.