Diverse Migration Journeys and Security Practices: Engaging with Longitudinal Perspectives of Migration and (Digital) Security (original) (raw)

Doing Digital Migration Studies: Methodological Considerations for an Emerging Research Focus

Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies , 2018

This chapter offers reflection on doing digital migration studies. Digital migration studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field focussed on studying migration in, through and by means of the internet. As the so-called European refugee crisis demonstrates, the scale, intensities and types of transnational migration and digital networking have drastically changed in recent years. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally transformed migration processes and vice versa. Top-down management of migration flows and border control is increasingly dependent on digital technologies and datafication, while from the bottom-up migrants use smart phones and apps to access information, maintain transnational relations, establish local connections and send remittances. In the first half of the chapter, drawing on (Candidatu et al., 2018) we distinguish between three paradigms of digital migration studies: (1) migrants in cyberspace; (2) everyday digital migrant life; (3) migrants as data. In the second half of the chapter, we offer the methodological research principles of relationality, adaptability and ethics-of-care to operationalize digital migration studies with a commitment to social justice. Challenging unjust power relations is important both when studying vulnerable groups as well as studying elites. The many experiences, obstacles and opportunities we found in the literature reveal that the future of digital migration studies lies at the intersection of big and small data, there is great urgency in triangulating quantified patterns with in-depth narrative accounts and situated experiences.

Between Empowerment and Surveillance: Forced Migration and Information and Communication Technologies

HUMANITAS, 2024

Amidst a surge in migration from conflict zones across the Middle East and Africa, leading to the arrival of more than a million displaced individuals in Europe, a nascent research field, primarily explored by European scholars, examines how information and communication technologies (ICTs) reshape refugees' experiences during and after migration. This emerging inquiry explores how ICTs can empower displaced migrants, enhancing their resilience and enabling survival, family connection, adaptation, inclusion, and rights advocacy. Concurrently, recent studies in the area of border and surveillance underscore technology's pivotal role in shaping security-oriented agendas within migration and mobility regimes across the US, EU, and other nations. This study systematically and critically reviews digital migration literature from 2006 to 2021 with metadata obtained and synthesized from Scopus and Dimensions databases, investigating the interplay between forced migrants' use of digital technologies to navigate restrictive migration systems and their interaction with surveillance technologies. It seeks to identify the ambivalent positions in digital migration studies and assess migrants' potential empowerment through ICTs.

Vulnerability, Digital Technologies and International Law: Reflections on Contemporary Migration Flows

Law, technology and humans, 2024

This article is the result of pooling of thoughts from the two authors. However, academically speaking, Antonia Cava was responsible for sections 1 and 2, and Maria Rita Bartolomei for sections 3 and 4. 2 The United Nations defines human rights as rights intrinsic to all human beings, whatever their nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language and any other status. All human beings are equally entitled to human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible. Migration, considered a 'total social fact', remains one of the most debated topics in contemporary society. Unfortunately, migration is not always a positive experience for everyone. Certain categories of people, such as women, children, persecuted ethnic minorities, and those fleeing conflict zones, widespread violence and natural disasters, are undoubtedly more exposed to its adverse effects. The socially disadvantaged conditions of migrants can also overlap with the risk of exclusion from digital literacy. 'Digital availability' is an essential asset for networking through the entire period of migration, which varies according to the departure and destination contexts and skills of use. Vulnerability can be a key concept when it comes to exploring the connection between migration processes and increasing digitisation, with both positive and negative consequences. Despite the frequent use of the term 'vulnerability' in political and legal discourse, its normative content is neither always clear nor universally accepted. Often treated as a self-explanatory condition, it is habitually used to distinguish migrants according to specific groups based on precise characteristicsespecially refugees or asylum seekerswithout specifying how the notion is conceptually understood or defined. The aim of our work is to provide some suggestions about three different concepts of vulnerability (subjective, situational and structural), the impact of the legal concept of vulnerability on migration processes and how situations of vulnerability are sometimes accentuated by the spread of media and social media.

Borders, Migration, and Technology in the Age of Security: Intervening with STS

Tecnoscienza - Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2022

In recent years, a broad and multidisciplinary literature has emerged at the intersection of critical border and migration studies, critical security studies, and science and technologies studies (STS). This literature has produced a rich conceptual repertoire for the analysis of digital technologies and infrastructures of border control and mobility governance. This scenario conceptually maps some of the core strands in this debate, which portray borders as complex and multi-located arrangements that create spaces of control and circulation, notions and images of "trusted" and/or "risky" travelers, and a globalized hierarchy of mobility rights. Furthermore, the scenario reflects on some major research avenues for STS to intervene in this debate and expose how border regimes are today imagined, designed, maintained, and critiqued.

Doing Digital Migration Studies. Theories and Practices of the Everyday.

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices. Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments – be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the digital’. The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.

Data Privacy and Displacement: A Cultural Approach

Journal of Refugee Studies, 2020

Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture linked to displacement, with safety as a key code and variant of data privacy. For the asylum seekers and refugees from South(east) Asia, the Middle East and African nations, safety was a concern in daily digital practice. Safety was a relational way of being, exercised through selective contacts and playful presentations of the self. Those presentations were deeply embedded in the logics of social media and stood in contrast to narratives of persecution, potentially posing problems for asylum claim determination in the future. Based on the lack of awareness of asylum seekers about data privacy and safety, a data safety workshop was designed, available on GitHub.

Investigating Migration within a Human Security Framework

In recent years a substantial volume of work has used a human security perspective to explore international migration. This paper reviews, synthesises and extends that work. It first characterises distinctive elements of human security analysis, under two headings: its equity dimensions, including a focus on all persons and on their basic needs, and its explanatory dimensions, including a stress on interconnections, also on a world-scale, and on the consequent intersections, opportunities and risks. The paper then identifies a series of contributions in migration studies: in descriptive and explanatory work and in policy analysis. Besides highlighting contributions, it looks at possible weaknesses and at relationships with sister streams of work, including livelihoods studies, well-being research, capability theory, and gender studies. While nearly all the various contributions from human security analysis can also be gained from one or more other streams of work, the human security framework provides a powerful and motivated synthesis, plus some useful distinctive elements, including the important theme of common security.

Special Issue: Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday - Editorial

Special Issue: "Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday.", 2022

This special issue explores the role that digital technology plays in the lives of migrants. It does so by paying close attention to governmental and supranational organizations as well as to subjective and affective dimensions of the everyday. Digital migration practices emerge as complex negotiations in the digital media sphere between infrastructural bias and agential opportunities, contesting racial practices as well as enabling digitally mediated bonds of solidarity and intimacy. The issue offers nuanced critical perspectives ranging from surveillance capitalism, extractive humanitarianism, datafication, and border regimes to choreographies of care and intimacy in transnational settings, among other aspects. Renowned international scholars reflect on these issues from different vantage points. The closing forum section provides state-of-the-art commentaries on digital diaspora, affect and belonging, voice and visibility in the digital media sphere, queer migrant interventions in non-academic settings, and datafication and media infrastructures in “deep time.”