Seeing, hearing and feeling belonging: The case of east timorese youth

This paper explores the politics of belonging for a young generation of East Timorese, known as the Geração Foun (Tetum, young/new generation), illustrated through the eyes of Osme, a youth who is wrestling to find his place in independent East Timor from afar, in Australia. Through a range of bodily engaged phenomena such as singing and performance I came to understand the affective experiences of young Timorese ‘being in the world’ but was challenged in representing these registers of belonging in the conventional ethnographic writing mode. The strength of using an integrated sound–image–text construction is mutually complementary and assists in my quest to convey the sensory and emotional registers of belonging.