Scrolling Down One's Life: The Importance of Information and Communication Technologies for the (forced) Migrants in Greece (original) (raw)
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Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday
Migrant Belongings: Digital Migration Practices and The Everyday (abstracts and bios)
Call for papers Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives. This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individuals as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression. This conference pays particular attention to the everyday use of digital media for the support of transnational lives, emotional bonds and cosmopolitan affiliations, focusing also on the role digital media play in shaping local/urban and national diasporic formations. This is because it becomes increasingly important to give everyday digital media usage a central role in investigations of transnational belonging, digital intimacy, diasporic community (re)production, migrant subject formation, long-distance political participation, urban social integration and local/national self-organization. Therefore we need to examine individual and collective user practices within the wider historical and cultural contexts of media studies, cultural studies and postcolonial cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity, geographies and the everyday. This also creates new challenges for cross-disciplinary dialogues that require an integration of ethnography with digital methods and critical data studies in order to look at the formation of identity and experience, representation, community building, and creating spaces of belongingness. Contributions are welcome from any field of study that engages with questions about how technology and social media usages mediate contemporary migration experiences, not only within media and communication studies, or digital and internet studies but also in neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender studies, race studies, psychology, law, visual studies, conflict studies, criminology, sociology, critical theory, political theory and international relations. Contributions that explore non-media-centric entry points by focusing on users’ digital practices and foregrounding ethnographic exploration as a uniting framework are especially welcome. The conference is part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Affective digital practices and the politics of emotion Digital diaspora Cosmopolitanism Cities and urban belonging Translocality and transnationalism Co-presence and togetherness Cultural capital Migrant visualization Appification of migration Platformization of migrant lives Gender and critical race The migration industry of connectivity Digital ethnography Transnational authoritarianism Networked conflicts Datafication and surveillance SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submissions for panels should be submitted via e-mail to ERC2020@uu.nl by 31 January 2021. Submission for panels should include a chairperson, a rationale for the panel (250 words), and the names of three speakers including their abstract (250 words) and biographical note (150 words). Abstracts should be submitted electronically, using the online submission system by 15 February 2021. Submissions for papers should include an abstract (max 300 words) and short biographical note (150 words) about the author including her/his current position and interest in the field of digital media and migration. For further questions please mail: ERC2020@uu.nl The PDF of this call for papers is available here. http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CFP\_MB.pdf
DIGITAL ROUTES, »DIGITAL MIGRANTS«: FROM EMPOWERMENT TO CONTROL OVER REFUGEES’ DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS
Družboslovne razprave, 2018
The text studies how digitality and refugee routes intersect by focussing on the concepts of »connected migrants« and the digital footprints of refugee routes in transnational spaces. The smartphone is a key signifier of today’s refugee, and possession of one is questioned by government policies of legitimisation and public opinion perceptions of what constitutes a »genuine refugee«. These overlook the complex question of digital rights and migration’s embeddedness in the fluidity of the postmodern world. The text thus deals with the digital world’s ambivalence, which is not just a one-way relation of empowerment but entails the risk of complete control over a refugee’s body as well. We establish that an important shift has occurred in European policies, one most visible in the process of erasing the electronic traces of refugees on the move and the illegal return of refugees to the previous country on their way, the so-called »pushbacks«.
Feminist Media Studies, 2017
In line with the European self-description of its borders as a space of "humanitarian securitization," this article approaches the border as a network of mediations around migrants and refugees, where emotions of fear and empathy co-exist through digital connectivities-what we call the "mediatized border." Drawing on media, security, and gender studies, we demonstrate how such techno-affective networks are constitutive of (rather than simply complementary to) the border as a hybrid site of both military protection and care for the vulnerable. We do this through hermeneutic and participatory engagements with the two main border sites of the 2015 migration "crisis," Italy and Greece, and discuss their implications on our understanding of the power relationships of human mobility.
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.
This Special Collection “Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe” historicizes, contextualizes, empirically grounds, and conceptually reflects on the impact of digital technologies on forced migration. In this introductory essay, we elaborate digital migration as a developing field of research. Taking the exceptional attention for digital mediation within the recent so-called “European refugee crisis” as a starting point, we reflect on the main conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges for this emerging field and how it is taking shape through interdisciplinary dialogues and in interaction with policy and public debate. Our discussion is organized around five central questions: (1) Why Europe? (2) Where are the field and focus of digital migration studies? (3) Where is the human in digital migration? (4) Where is the political in digital migration? and (5) How can we de-center Europe in digital migration studies? Alongside establishing common ground between various communities of scholarship, we plea for non-digital-media-centric-ness and foreground a commitment toward social change, equity and social justice.
The digital force in forced migration: Imagined affordances and gendered practices
Popular Communication, 2018
This article illustrates through two case studies how gendered practices structure imagined affordances of technologies. Using the example of two women seeking asylum in Germany, the article shows how the women engaged with the affordances of visibility and sociality and how institutionalized living associated with the asylum bureaucracy and gendered logics reinforced by that system shaped the women's engagement. The women used creative tactics to engage with technology, skillfully navigating and appropriating the terrain of situated gendered discourses. The article reiterates the importance of understanding how gendered practices and norms intersect with forced movement but also argues for exploring more how technology structures gendered imaginations, discourses, and practices in relation to migration. In addition, the article calls for examining imagined technological affordances within their historical, political, and institutionalized settings in order to avoid a technocentric perspective.
Media and Communication, 2022
Life in exile presents hardship and brings with it multiple personal and socio-political challenges and grievances. Being forced into separation from family and home society often stimulates the desire to maintain belonging and contact with families and communities. “Co-presence” and “being there” require a lot of personal effort and commitment. Communication and mediation strategies have a special significance as everyday practices in social and digital media technologies. “Mobile belonging” and staying connected across various online and offline spaces and in various social and political environments and communities can be a constant requirement in digital exile. After an introduction to relevant literature about the complexity of media communication, belonging, and migration, the article examines mobile media technologies and the central role they play in everyday exile. Following a discussion about the notion of “digital exile” and “mobile belonging,” the second part of the arti...