Smart(phone) travelling: understanding the use and impact of mobile technology on irregular migration journeys (original) (raw)
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On the Move The Role of Smartphones in Asylum Seekers Journeys Extended Abstract
This study aims to address some of the existing lacunae on the topic of the journeys by focusing on how asylum seekers use smartphones during their journeys from the Middle East to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea, using data gathered from 19 in-depth interviews. More specifically, it analyzes how smartphones have the capacity to influence the mobility and agency of asylum seekers on the move.
Connected Routes: Migration Studies with Digital Devices and Platforms
Social Media + Society, 2018
The article builds upon critical border studies for the study of the European migration crisis that take into account the digital, both in terms of telecommunications infrastructure and media platforms. In putting forward an approach to migration studies with digital devices, here the emphasis is shifted from “bordering” to “routing.” First, the current analytical situation is sketched as one where the “connective” route is contrasted to the “securitised” one, made by European policy and monitoring software. Subsequently, we ask, how are connective migrant routes being made into accounts and issues in social media? Two case studies are presented, each describing routing in terms of the distinctive accounts made of migrant journeying. In the first, routes are seen from the point of view of its curation in Getty Images, and in particular of the images privileged by its social layer. In the image collection, the “sanitised route” (as we call it) gradually leads to a soft landing in Europe, cleansed of anti-refugee sentiment. In the second, we ask how camps and borders are problematized from the point of view of the traveler using TripAdvisor. In the “interrupted tourist route,” would-be visitors are concerned with a Europe made unsafe, thereby rerouting their own journeys on the basis of social media commenting. We conclude with reflection about the advantages of employing social media in migration and border studies for the study of “media journeys” as routes from multiple vantage points, developing the idea that route-work also can be understood as platform-work.
The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), considered as smartphones, mobile phones and on occasion computers throughout this thesis, revealed themselves to be more than a connection to family, it was a life-saving object, a journey companion for asylum seekers making the journey across Europe. The aim of this thesis is to explore and understand the importance and influence of these pieces of mobile technology over asylum seekers’ decision-making process whilst crossing Europe. We draw upon data collected through qualitative methods: interviews, participant observations, reports and studies. Eight interviews were conducted with asylum-seekers and refugees, currently living in Denmark or Belgium, as well as with professionals in the field concerned with and interested in the subject. Our collected data is framed and analysed through a specific theoretical framework, relying mainly on Latour’s ‘Actor-Network Theory’ (1996), an approach about the significance of nonhuman actants in human decisions. This theory is supported by Xiang and Lindquist’s ‘Migration Infrastructure’ approach (2014), demonstrating how a migrant is being moved by several structural dimensions and their elements. Finally, ‘Social Navigation’ by Vigh (2006) will supplement this whole subject approach, offering an interpretative tool with regards to the strategies deployed by asylum seekers as they migrate. The analysis of this thesis is organised around three working-questions, supplementing the research question through three axes of exploration. We begin with an enquiry about asylum seekers’ decision-making process upon their final destination country, followed by an examination regarding asylum seekers’ strategies to bypass the European regulatory system and lastly we consider the means by which asylum-seekers avoid the use of smugglers to carry out their journey. Keywords: ICTs, asylum seekers, strategies, Digital Humanitarianism, Latour, Xiang & Lindquist, Vigh, ‘Migration Infrastructure’, ‘Actor-Network Theory’, ‘Social Navigation’.
The use of ICT in contemporary mixed migration flows to Europe
The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media became a key characteristic of mixed migration flows to Europe in 2015 and 2016. Both before but increasingly also during migration, migrants and refugees rely on their smartphones and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and Google Maps, to get information on routes and intended countries of destination, to foster contact between smugglers and brokers or to reach out to others when in distress. Drawing on recent findings and reports, this paper proposes a typology of ways in which ICTs and social media are used by migrants and refugees before and especially during irregular migration. This series produced by RMMS showcases key issues in mixed migration, highlights new research and discusses emerging trends.
Disrupted becomings: The role of smartphones in Syrian refugees’ physical and existential journeys
Geoforum, 2019
This paper explores the role of smartphones in facilitating the journeys of predominantly young, male Syrians following the onset of the civil war. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with Syrian refugees who have reached Denmark but are at different stages of the asylum process, it traces the multiple disruptions they have experienced and delves into the ways in which they navigate in their search for a better life. Their smartphones are shown to be vital tools in a myriad of ways at all stages of their physical and existential journeys starting from their lives in Syria and then Turkey, the boat crossing to Greece, overland through Europe, seeking asylum and settling into Denmark. The concept of 'chronic disruption' is developed to capture the ways in which refugees are constantly facing new hurdles in their lives, which smartphones play a key role both physically and existentially in their attempts to overcome. This paper makes an original contribution to migration studies by bringing together an analysis of the role smartphones play as part of migration infrastructure, both in facilitating access to the migration industry and shaping migrants' journeys, aspects which are rarely brought together in one study.
The Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances
Social Media & Society, 2018
This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide.
Introduction—Migrants and Their Smartphones
Transfers
The increasing symbiosis between contemporary mobility and global Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been widely recognized in both migration and media studies.1 Advanced media technology, including smartphones, facilitates information exchange and instantaneous communication.2 The pervasive use of smartphones is an everyday reality for migrants, whose activities are increasingly taking place online and in real time.3 Smartphone use by migrants and their families illustrates the different scales of modern mobility within structural socioeconomic and political orders.4 Smartphones, and those applications downloaded to the device, enhance connectivity5 with regard to transactions, entertainment, socialization, networking, and activism. They help with community building and boost a sense of belonging among people who are connected via various applications.
Getting to Europe the Whatsapp Way: The Use of ICT in Contemporary Mixed Migration Flows to Europe
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016
The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media became a key characteristic of mixed migration flows to Europe in 2015 and 2016. Both before but increasingly also during migration, migrants and refugees rely on their smartphones and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and applications such as WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and Google Maps, to get information on routes and intended countries of destination, to foster contact between smugglers and brokers or to reach out to others when in distress. Drawing on recent findings and reports, this paper proposes a typology of ways in which ICTs and social media are used by migrants and refugees before and especially during irregular migration.
Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances
Social Media + Society
This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migrati...
Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2019
This article reports findings from fieldwork and analyses the impact of mobile technologies and social media on increasing migration flows in Morocco, particularly in the city of Fès. The role of smartphones as a means to support the use of maps, global positioning apps and the use of social media like Facebook and WhatsApp have become essential tools for refugees and undocumented migrants. This article focuses on these logistical aspects, intended as constantly changing adaptations between life-forms and interactions with the social, political and economic conditions to which migrants are exposed. Logistics is understood as the nexus between migrants and these various logistical tools, influencing their mobility and identities, as well as modifying the organisation of communities and cities (of provenance, transit and destination).