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What does the increased reliance on digital communication technologies by migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, migrant communities, governments and researchers reveal about the benefits, limits and politics of everyday mobile and immobile experiences during the pandemic? This introduction to the special issue on cultures of (im)mobile entanglements addresses this inquiry, alongside ten articles covering themes of governance and surveillance, agency and negotiated subjectivities, translocal and transnational solidarity, as well as doing research in pandemic times. Critically engaging with both mobility and immobility in the intersecting field of mobilities and migration research, the special issue centres a multidimensional and multi-scalar perspective on the deep interlinking of various modes of mobilities and stasis in and beyond spatial and temporal conditions mediated by politically and culturally structured digitalization. It endeavours to create a vantage point to critically examine the mobility–immobility continuum as informed by power relations, hierarchies and inequalities in a networked and global society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the communication activities of Filmstichting West Indië, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced 12 documentary propaganda films about Dutch colonial Suriname, and the resistance against these reductive representations in zines of the Surinamese migrant organization Vereniging Ons Suriname. We draw on hence unstudied archival material to dissect the role of media operations, as persuasive, strategic media productions, in constructing and challenging differential relations between colonizers and colonial subjects, and symbolically negotiating how different territories and bodies relate to each other. A visual and textual analysis of the cases unpacks historical struggles over the regimes of (post)colonial (im)mobilities, as they are produced and articulated within regimes of representation. We ultimately argue that, in order to understand the historical constitution of mobility regimes (and, in order to be able to critique them), we need to study the co-production of mobility regimes within regimes of mediated representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces the thematic issue titled Inclusive Media Literacy Education for Diverse Societies. We start by introducing our aims for developing a more open and inviting approach to media education. We argue for a media education that acknowledges a variety of voices, and that provides skills and recognition for everyone, irrespective of their social class, status, gender identification, sexuality, race, ability, and other variables. The articles in this issue address the role of media literacy education in relation to questions of in- and exclusion, social justice, voice, and listening. The issue covers a variety of critical, non-Western perspectives needed to challenge dominant regimes of representation. The editorial is enriched by the artist Neetje's illustrations of the workshop that preceded the publication of this thematic issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Chinese context, this investigation addresses how digital labor platforms as specific instances of social media, mediate interactions between workers and clients. This article addresses the evolving landscape of domestic labor in contemporary China, specifically focusing on female internal migrant workers - commonly referred to as "Ayi's" -- in the gig economy. More specifically, by employing a feminist intersectional lens, we analyze the platformization of migrant Ayi's identities on digital labor platforms and Chinese super-apps like WeChat and Swan Daojia. We also address how these rural-to-urban migrants may use these platforms to create new narratives for themselves. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 female migrant workers alongside a walkthrough study of three digital labor platforms, Ayi's are found to represent themselves by branding themselves. This form of self-marketing offers the potential to transform their visibility in public from perceived low-skilled laborers to "pre-packaged" professionals. While enhancing visibility, and thereby improving the standing of some, the representational practices of Ayi's also offer insights into newly emergent forms of vulnerability and marginalization, shaped by gender, migrant status, and socioeconomic class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the role that digital technology plays in the lives of migrants. It does so by paying close attention to governmental and supranational organizations as well as to subjective and affective dimensions of the everyday. Digital migration practices emerge as complex negotiations in the digital media sphere between infrastructural bias and agential opportunities, contesting racial practices as well as enabling digitally mediated bonds of solidarity and intimacy. The issue offers nuanced critical perspectives ranging from surveillance capitalism, extractive humanitarianism, datafication, and border regimes to choreographies of care and intimacy in transnational settings, among other aspects. Renowned international scholars reflect on these issues from different vantage points. The closing forum section provides state-of-the-art commentaries on digital diaspora, affect and belonging, voice and visibility in the digital media sphere, queer migrant interventions in non-academic settings, and datafication and media infrastructures in "deep time." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During settlement, migrant youth negotiate between various transitional spaces, which include educational, mediated and transnational spaces. To what extent can critical media literacy education acknowledge and strengthen young migrants' resilience? In this article, we evaluate the Netherlands-based participatory action research project Critical media literacy through making media. Gathered empirical data include participant observation in two classes, in-depth interviews with 3 teachers and 19 students, as well an 18-minute film reflection. The focus is on how understandings, procedures and affectivity shape young migrants' mindful media literacy practice. In order to develop media literacy education which works for all, we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all model based on the norms of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. Drawing on our experiences of co-creating, practicing and evaluating a curriculum with teachers and migrant students, we demonstrate the urgency of situated, reflexive, flexible, culture and context-aware critical media literacy education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serving as the introduction to the special issue on 'Migrant narratives', this article proposes a multi-perspectival and multi-stakeholder analysis of how migration is narrated in the media in the last decade. This research agenda is developed by focussing on groups of actors that are commonly studied in isolation from each other: (1) migrants, (2) media professionals such as journalists and spokespersons from humanitarian organizations, (3) governments and corporations and (4) artists and activists. We take a relational approach to recognize how media power is articulated alongside a spectrum of more top-down and more bottom-up perspectives, through specific formats, genres and styles within and against larger frameworks of governmentality. Taken together, the poetics and politics of migrant narratives demand attention respectively for how stakeholders variously aesthetically present and politically represent migration. The opportunities, challenges, problems and commitments observed among the four groups of actors also provide the means to rethink our practice and responsibilities as media and migration scholars contributing to decentring media technologies and re-humanizing migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital migration scholarship has foregrounded how migrants (refugees, forced migrants, expatriates among others) use smartphones and social media to technologically mediate co-presence with loved ones and friends abroad. Aural, visual and haptic affordances give shape to feelings of co-presence, triggering various affects. Affectivity refers here to bodily sensations like joy which can be circulated among migrant families and friendship groups, through digital networks. Paradoxically, maintaining bonds as well as keeping face can be felt as emotionally taxing, triggering negative affective intensities such as fear, anxiety, shame and guilt. Still, the young refugees I have interviewed feel strongly compelled to transnationally connect because they strongly care. Therefore, this research note proposes the notion of digital care labour to attend to the emotional, digital labour involved in maintaining transnational connections between people living at distance, in starkly diverging material conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon arrival to Europe, young adult gay migrants are found grappling with sexual norms, language demands, cultural expectations, values and beliefs that may differ from their country of origin. Parallel processes of coming-out, coming-of-age and migration are increasingly digitally mediated. Young adult gay migrants are "connected migrants", using smartphones and social media to maintain bonding ties with contacts in their home country while establishing new bridging relationships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality, socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, and gender and sexuality have an impact upon identification and subordination, thus we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all young adult gay migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between those living on the margins of Europe--forced migrants including non-normative racialized young gay men--and voluntary migrants--such as elite expatriates including wealthy, white and Western young gay men. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews conducted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with young adult gay forced and voluntary migrants, this article aims to understand how sexual identification in tandem with bonding and bridging social capital diverge and converge between the two groups all while considering the interplay between the online and offline entanglements of their worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European authorities are increasingly screening asylum seekers' phones at the cost of their fundamental rights. In this piece, we suggest a procedural shift - prioritising fairness in the asylum procedure and voluntary cooperation towards purposeful goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Young migrants – particularly refugees – are commonly the object of stereotypical visual media representations and often have no choice but to position themselves in response to them. This article explores whether making young migrants aware of the politics of representation through media literacy education contributes to strengthening their participation and resilience. We reflect on a media literacy program developed with teachers and 100 students at a Dutch “International Transition Classes” school. The educational program focuses on visual media production using smartphones, raising critical consciousness and promoting civic engagement. Ethnographic data analyzed include field notes, a focus group with teachers, in-depth and informal interviews, student-produced footage, and a 10-minute ethnographic film. In our increasingly polarized mediatized world, better recognition of how the needs of certain young people diverge depending on how they are situated in racialized, gendered, and classed structures of power is needed to work towards inclusive media literacy education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]