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This is a commentary to the Special Issue ‘Textures of Diaspora and (Post-) Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach’, edited by Shola Adenekan, Julia Borst and Linda Maeding. The commentary reflects on digital diaspora as a travelling concept, and considers the analytic scope of the terms post-migration, post-digital and post-global for digital diasporas studies. I argue digital diaspora studies can be situated in the following continuums: universal-particular, decentring‐recentering, global‐local, inclusion and exclusion as well as media-centrism and non-media-centrism. Future scholarship may listen better to the sounds of digital diasporas and attend to the implications of digital platformization.

This article addresses the smartphone as a complicated technology of forced migration: a device that accompanies those who move, but which also records and catalogues digital traces within life contexts of conflict, uprooting, migration and resettlement. We conceptualise smartphones as personal digital archives: migrants’ curation of their own stories on their own portable devices. Personal digital archives, we argue, reflect the migrant gaze and constitute mobile subaltern subjects’ record of forced migration. Inductively learning from fieldwork conducted across five sites over 5 years, we analyse how the personal digital archive records and reflects the mediation of migration in its three dimensions: symbolic, affective and material. By focussing on personal digital archives, we recentre the authority of migrants as witnessing subjects of their own life stories. Their archives as autonomous migrant records provide a powerful basis to reflect upon and potentially contest mainstream western journalism cultures, which too often reduce migration to a spectacle and the migrant to a dehistoricised figure with little agency or voice.

The commentary provides the reader with several genealogies of data and care, key themes that underpin the theorisation, as well as the methodological and ethical operationalisation of a more caring digital migration studies described in this book. By doing that, it shows how pursuing careful data engagement allows understanding and reflection on the “ambivalence and shifting tensions” inherent in care-technology relations. The genealogies discussed show how neither migration nor data nor care are singular totalities but co-exist with limits and paradoxes. This is furthermore important when a caring perspective on data in migration studies is more and more relevant. This relevance is seen as a response to the recent trend of seeing migration as a laboratory where experiments with big data can be conducted and the overarching data ideology that depicts migrations as something that can be controlled through more or better data without having to come to terms with underpinning large-scale historical, socio-cultural, geo-political and economic concerns.

The commentary provides the reader with several genealogies of data and care, key themes that underpin the theorisation, as well as the methodological and ethical operationalisation of a more caring digital migration studies described in this book. By doing that, it shows how pursuing careful data engagement allows understanding and reflection on the “ambivalence and shifting tensions” inherent in care-technology relations. The genealogies discussed show how neither migration nor data nor care are singular totalities but co-exist with limits and paradoxes. This is furthermore important when a caring perspective on data in migration studies is more and more relevant. This relevance is seen as a response to the recent trend of seeing migration as a laboratory where experiments with big data can be conducted and the overarching data ideology that depicts migrations as something that can be controlled through more or better data without having to come to terms with underpinning large-scale historical, socio-cultural, geo-political and economic concerns.

Addressing the particular context of China, this article has two aims. First, it offers reflections on the possibilities and limitations of using user-generated short videos (vlogs) as research data both methodologically and ethically. We specifically explore the potential of centering vlogs as a new format for examining motherhood behavior across online and offline spaces. Secondly, it adds to the thematic literature on the (re)production and representations of motherhood. We critically examine the rising phenomenon in China of the stay-at-home mother, by exploring how these mothers use short video platforms. Inductively learning from the thematic analysis of short videos of stay-at-home mothers published on Douyin, the patterns in the data indicate three distinct forms of labor are performed through digital motherhood practices: domestic labor, affective labor, and entrepreneurial labor. Drawing on these patterns, we update the original framework of “motherhood 2.0,” which was coined in the 2010s to address mothering practices in industrialized western societies. We extend this framework and conceptualize “motherhood 3.0” by analyzing a type of Chinese community-based intersectional performance of motherhood, gender, and labor that we see emerging in digital cultural production centered on short videos. Mediated labor within online and offline motherhood practices is informed by social, cultural, and technological factors. Digital technologies and mobile media communication provide new means for stay-at-home mothers to navigate between their roles as devoted mothers and their pursuit of self-actualization.

Contemporary migration infrastructures commonly reflect imaginaries of technological solutionism. Fantasies of efficient ordering, administrating and limiting of refugee bodies in space and time through migration infrastructures are distinctive, but not novel as they draw on long historical lineages. Drawing on archival records, we present a case-study on post-World-War-II refugee encampments. By highlighting the deeply historical role of media in migration governance, i.e. the act of mediation through technological infrastructuring, we seek to bring together the fields of migration studies and media studies. We argue that this cross-fertilization helps to historically untangle power dimensions, inherent workings, as well as human experiences imbued in the tech-based management of migration ‘crises’. Uncovering historical underpinnings of digitalized asylum regimes through the prism of media infrastructures, and socio-technical imaginaries surrounding them, points at continuities and genealogies of containing and managing people in time and space, reaching into technologies of colonial and fascist projects. We thus seek to explore the assumptions that drive the build-up of migration and media infrastructures: How are migrants, camps, media and their infrastructural interrelations imagined? Which cultural horizons are reflected in technologies, which functions are imagined for whom, and how are utilitarian ideas about humanitarianism and migration control embedded?

While infrastructures of media and of migration currently converge in specific ways, in this commentary, we consider how these infrastructures always reflect distinctive moments in media history, as well as in migration history. An archaeological approach to infrastructure posits that media infrastructures do not spring into action fully formed, and neither is there ever a moment when they would be fully formed. We propose the perspective of deep time of infrastructures as a way of opening up unresolved questions about what critical researchers can and should do with historically-informed inquiry of media technologies across migration contexts. We specifically operationalize the deep time of media and migration infrastructures by addressing the three dimensions of: (1) materialities; (2) practices; and (3) imaginaries.

Though the intersection of postcolonial theory and media studies might seem an obvious one due to their common focus on representation, the role of institutions and the transnational dimension, a critical assessment of their relationship and potential is to some extent under-theorized and long overdue. This has to do with the disciplinary entrenchment of the two fields: postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literary studies and initially focused strongly on textual criticism, whereas media studies developed more in connection with media objects, such as film and television, and focused on issues of production, reception and distribution. However, both fields can be considered relatively young with respect to more traditional disciplines. They emerged as a contestation of ...

In this chapter, I chart the explanatory power of the concept of migration infrastructures. My focus is specifically on what can be called ‘migration crisis infrastructures’: contemporary tech-driven interventions developed to disrupt forced-migration crisis situations across the world, and I draw attention to the historical lineages of these interventions.

This article focuses on young Londoners’ everyday digital connectedness in the global city and examines the urban imaginaries these connections generate and regulate. Young people engage with a range of mobilities, networks, and technologies in trying to find their place in a city, which is only selectively hospitable to them. Offline and online connections also shape urban imaginaries that direct moral and practical positioning toward others living close by and at a distance. We draw from a two-year study with 84 young people of different class and racial backgrounds living in three London neighborhoods. The study reveals the divergence of youth’s urban imaginaries that result from uneven access to material and symbolic resources in the city. However, it also reveals the convergence of urban imaginaries, resulting especially from widespread practices of diversified connectedness. More often than not, young participants reveal a cosmopolitan orientation and a positive disposition toward difference. Cosmopolitanism becomes a common discursive tool urban youth mobilize, but differentially appropriate, to narrate and regulate belonging in an interconnected world and an unequal city.

The question of how we can live together with difference is more urgent than ever, now that more than half of the world’s population live in cities. For example, the majority of London’s inhabitants are ethnic minorities. Following Massey (2005), city dwellers negotiate a situation of intense “throwntogetherness,” as they live in the proximity of ethnic, racial, and religious others. Shifting the dominant focus of media and migration scholarship from transnational communication toward local everyday practices, this article develops the notion of digital throwntogetherness to chart relationships between geographically situated digital identifications and the urban politics of cultural difference and encounter. The argument draws from in-depth interviews with 38 young people living in Haringey, one of the most diverse areas in London, and builds on digital methods for network visualizations. Two Facebook user experiences are considered: transnational networking with loved ones scattered around the world and engagement with geographically proximate diverse digital identifications.

The report has tried to address the following questions: what happens when new subjectivities (embodying linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity) or new digital machines (embodying behaviours that sometimes disturb the existing hierarchisations of the school) operate within established educational institutions in a period of acute economic crisis? Which are the institutional strategies adopted for dealing with these invasions? How are the invaders (migrant students) affected by these strategies and what type of tactics do they pursue in order to contest them? What is the role of digital machines in the production of relations of tension between normalisation and contestation? What are the gender dynamics produced in the context of these tensions?

This dissertation employs social representations (SR) theory (Moscovici, 1961/2008, 1988, 1984/2001a) to conceptualize social media as digital public spheres or online (trans)formative sites of everyday social knowledge. The thesis further relates social media to the three dimensions that make a public sphere according to Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernandez (2015)—political, spatial, and psychosocial. This dissertation also introduces time as a fourth dimension (temporal) that brings the three dimensions together, emphasizes how social media have revolutionized people’s relationship with time and (virtual) space, and highlights how the interrelation among social media, time, and (virtual) space influence the way people as members of a community jointly develop meanings of social objects, interactions, or events—for instance, migrants and their collective constructions of their home and host lands anchored in space and time. To substantiate the above conceptualizations, this dissertation presents three empirical studies conducted through an overarching digital ethnographic methodology. Facebook is employed as the principal social media platform and research base, migration (and migration-related phenomena) as focal object of social knowledge, and Filipino migrants in Germany as the partner community and sample group. Data were gathered using mainly qualitative methods, especially participant observation, online ethnographic routines and data gathering techniques (Postill and Pink, 2012), and focus group discussions. Qualitative techniques were also used to analyze the data, except for the first empirical study where text mining methods were also employed. Overall, findings illustrate the multiple aspects of Facebook as an actively evolving and multifaceted digital site of social representations of migration in its different forms (i.e., as pragmatic-discursive content, identity and positioning dynamics, and embodied, spatio-temporal norms and artifacts) among Filipino migrants in Germany. These empirical insights in turn provide a richer, dialogical, and contextually sensitive framework by which to investigate shared meaning-making—whether as content, process, and practice—as it develops within social media, while these interactive platforms are likewise continuously transformed by the communities who use them.

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An interview might be a rather unorthodox format for an epilogue for a book of such overarching and ambitious scope. However, if the preoccupation with voice is one of the fundamental concerns of this work, then a dialogic interview is a fitting topic vehicle to explore its workings. Another fundamental concern for this handbook is a growing discourse of crisis with relation to migration. The Syrian exodus is irrevocably linked to this by virtue of its unprecedented mediatization. Thus came about the idea to conclude this work with a conversation with Zaina Erhaim, who through her journalism and activism had been at the heart of the Syrian conflict since its very beginning. What comes out loud and clear through this interview is that Erhaim’s and others’ work is a continuous struggle against a multiplicity of interrelated erasures: The erasure of women from the public sphere by patriarchic and conservative logics. The erasure of the professional identity and expertise of the other by neo-colonial and orientalist logics privileging the west in the production of knowledge. The erasure of complexity by a hegemonic ideological model of war in sensationalist and binary news framing and production. And the erasure of the dissenting subject by the bureaucracy of authoritarian states and technologies of control and surveillance. These tensions and concerns are at the heart of many chapters in this handbook.

The focus of the chapter is on researching the intersecting effects of the mobility of contemporary borders, ‘hostile environment’ government immigration campaigns and longer histories of racism and xenophobia in the UK. Together these disparate forces are theorised as constituting and mediating a pervasive climate. Engaging with three literatures on: (1) weathering; (2) debility; and (3) social suffering, the chapter draws from original research studies on dying migrants and UK immigration information campaigns to show how climates of hostility and structural injustice can wear down and debilitate racially marked migrants. A critical, methodological question that is tackled is how researchers might become empirically receptive to the complex intertwining of experiences of the debilitations of weathering and social suffering that are overlooked in the media interest in migration as a series of short-term events. The author describes her use of scalar analysis that includes bringing together different genres and forms such as social theory and poetry, images, art and fiction to trace the impact of hostile climates and the slow moving violations of weathering. The chapter suggests that scalar analysis and the use of performance methods in migration research can help researchers to discern and trace the effects of migration and racialised hostility over time and serves to highlight discussions of what constitutes ‘proof’ in research and activism.