Diaspora Encounters as Signs

Sub-Saharan African migrants from Ghana extend and adapt to their new home in Australia, their local religious discourses created to make meaning of their journey. The discourses undergo a metamorphic process; they are used as discursive tools for negotiating migrants’ conditions and serve as the socio-cultural and psychological bridging for the transition from arrival to settling in the new home, thus interlacing the liminal stages across boundaries and borders. The discourses have two other effects. On the one hand, they inspire the extension of local religious practices to the host land and provide the foundation for the diaspora mission agenda. On the other hand, they contest the dominant discourse about their presence and placemaking. This article, part of a larger project, employs qualitative ethnography-based fieldwork, encompassing interviews and participant observation to investigate the phenomenon among Ghanaian migrants of the Church of Pentecost in Sydney, Australia, between 2014 and 2023

CONTEST · Diaspora · Liminality · Negotiation · Participant observation · Phenomenon · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Christian Theology and Mission · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity