ABSTRACT
This chapter explores mobile socialities and media practices in the context of refugee camps in post-war Germany (ca. 1945-1960). In refugee camps, forcefully mobilised individuals are forcefully immobilised, making the camp into an institution, where national-territorialist imaginaries of belonging and disbelonging are negotiated - through controlling (im)mobility and respective socialities. Based on archival material from post-war German shelters, this chapter explores these paradoxical workings of mobilisation and immobilisation in forced migration processes. To do so, media practice theory serves as an analytical prism to observe socialities enacted in and around media, which make up experiences of mobility and immobility. The material here points at three dimensions of media practices, shaping mobile socialities: socio-material immobilisation through the set-up of physical spaces, creating forced sociality as well as encapsulation and segregation; media technological environments and repertoires in camps, enabling and controlling communication and connectivity; and mobilising media and communication practices of resistance, activism and protest among camp residents. This variety of camp-based media practices provides a historical perspective on how practices around media shape a spectrum of both mobile and immobile socialities and anti-socialities. Apart from counteracting a rhetoric of newness often found in accounts of mobile media and digital communication, such historicizations of media practices in camps, ultimately, lead us to preceding articulations of socialities and anti-socialities, where mobility and immobility have been negotiated and imagined in an extreme counter-space at the margins of society, which always reflects its utopian ideas of inside and outside.
