ABSTRACT
This volume addressed how migrants navigate their being in the world, crossing national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational belongings, while facing new forms of surveillance, control and datafication. We took as a starting point the main premise that the relationships between digital media technologies and migration / mobilities cannot be captured within the limited confines of single disciplines. Aiming to animate an interdisciplinary exchange, we therefore purposefully invited contributors from various fields and areas of expertise, including media, communication, geography, anthropology and sociology, to share their perspectives on (studying) migration in relation to digital media technologies. The chapters included were all previously presented during the April 2021 online conference Migrant Belongings. Digital Practices and the Everyday. Clear shared foci could be observed in the 200-plus papers submitted to the conference. The chapters included here were selected to develop new insights in five thematic strands that we discerned at the conference and that are significant for the development of the field of digital migration studies:
Creative practices: researching media and migration by exploring the various creative practices and modalities through which figures, tropes, frames and imaginaries of the “migrant”, the “refugee”, the “border crosser” and the “mobile individual” may be constructed, negotiated, questioned and destabilized;
Digital diaspora and placemaking: nuanced claims about the possibilities afforded by digital technologies to transcend place and time by reconsidering the emotions, materialities and symbolic processes of translocal connectivity, socio-cultural integration and placemaking across situated contexts;
Affect and belonging: addressing the politics of emotion in the context of accelerating but uneven forms and experiences of mobility and mediation. Specific attention is paid to the intersections of sex and gender, as structuring forces and intense emotional registers;
Visuality and digital media: addressing how visual politics and sense making, within the context of the increasing platformization of migration and mobility, shape and give meaning to forms of belonging;
Datafication, infrastructuring and securitization: accounting for the shifting nexus between humanitarianism and securitization by addressing how digitalizing and datafying migration infrastructures are made and negotiated from below in everyday life settings.
