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In dit forumartikel werd door wetenschappers werkzaam in verschillende disciplines stilgestaan bij verschillende aspecten en mogelijke gevolgen van het gebruik van een ouderapp op de kinderopvang. Het eerste deel van het artikel start vanuit de beroepspraktijk van de kinderopvang en benadrukt de visie van kinderopvangmedewerkers op digitale media, waarbij ouderapps voornamelijk als waardevol worden ervaren, wat in contrast staat met hun zorgen over de impact van digitale media op jonge kinderen. Vervolgens komen vier disciplinaire perspectieven aan bod: een pedagogisch, juridisch, psychologisch en mediawetenschappelijk perspectief. Hierin wordt gewaarschuwd voor de ‘dataficatie’ van kinderen en de mogelijke conflicten met pedagogische waarden zoals privacy en autonomie. Ook wordt de naleving van kinderrechten besproken, met speciale aandacht voor privacy en gegevensbescherming van kinderen. Vervolgens wordt de rol van aandacht bij het gebruik van ouderapps behandeld, waarbij wordt gewezen op de belasting van het werkgeheugen van kinderopvangmedewerkers en ouders. Uiteindelijk wordt de impact overwogen van het veelvuldig delen van foto’s via ouderapps, waarbij wordt gewezen op de behoefte aan constante verbondenheid tussen ouders en kinderen en de mogelijke effecten op onder andere sociale druk. Er wordt geconstateerd dat hoewel ouderapps voordelen bieden in termen van administratie en communicatie, er zorgvuldig moet worden omgegaan met de mogelijke negatieve gevolgen, zoals privacy kwesties, verhoogde werkdruk en verstoring van de interactie tussen kinderopvangmedewerkers, ouders en kinderen.

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.

In our contemporary world, migration and digital technologies mutually shape one another. They have historically always been intertwined, yet their dynamic relationship is constantly evolving. People on the move mediate their being and belonging in increasing conditions of datafication and digitization. Mobile devices, social media platforms and smartphone apps are used to shape the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process illustrate the proliferation of migration-related digital practices.

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

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.

Focusing on research methodologies, this chapter addresses the potential and challenges of participatory action research (PAR) for working with marginalized youth communities in the context of media education and media literacy research. PAR may offer new opportunities to bridge the perspectives of academics, practitioners, and learners. Rather than conducting research on a community, it is an approach to research with communities. Participatory action research enables researchers to ensure that their academic objectives are aligned with the interests of the participants. The chapter is structured in three sections. In the first, we examine PAR objectives and detail where PAR originated. Second, we discuss the type of research questions PAR approaches can cover in relation to critical media literacy theories, introduce methodological techniques, and outline the challenges. Third, we present five principles – related to power relations, stakeholders, ethics, process, and reflection – for carrying out PAR. In general, PAR may contribute to larger changes currently observable in academia. Universities are increasingly seeking to rebrand the academic landscape, not as an ivory tower removed from society but as a publicly engaged institution. PAR provides an approach, methodology, and social justice-based ethics to support this broader shift toward engaged, community-based research.

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.

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.

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.

Focusing on research methodologies, this chapter addresses the potential and challenges of participatory action research (PAR) for working with marginalized youth communities in the context of media education and media literacy research. PAR may offer new opportunities to bridge the perspectives of academics, practitioners, and learners. Rather than conducting research on a community, it is an approach to research with communities. Participatory action research enables researchers to ensure that their academic objectives are aligned with the interests of the participants. The chapter is structured in three sections. In the first, we examine PAR objectives and detail where PAR originated. Second, we discuss the type of research questions PAR approaches can cover in relation to critical media literacy theories, introduce methodological techniques, and outline the challenges. Third, we present five principles - related to power relations, stakeholders, ethics, process, and reflection - for carrying out PAR. In general, PAR may contribute to larger changes currently observable in academia. Universities are increasingly seeking to rebrand the academic landscape, not as an ivory tower removed from society but as a publicly engaged institution. PAR provides an approach, methodology, and social justice-based ethics to support this broader shift toward engaged, community-based research.

Since the 1980s, media literacy has been a central topic in the field of communication, media, and education studies as a result of a parallel growth of polarization between societal groups and use of digital technologies for self-representation. In this article, we present a brief overview of the evolvement of media literacy and other competing terms and discuss emerging approaches that incorporate issues related to the politics of difference, representations and voice of marginalised groups. Although existing concepts and projects focus on singular aspects such as representation and media production by minorities, they do not commonly integrate concerns of diversity and media literacy education from a critical and holistic perspective. Building on critical pedagogy, feminist and decolonial theory, there is a need for a more inclusive and intersectional approach to media literacy education. Such an approach should focus not only on marginalized groups but also on society as a whole, it should advocate a critical understanding of the mediated construction of reality and offer grounds to successfully challenge dominant representations, and it should equip people with the skills not only to participate and raise their own voices but also to pay more attention to practices of listening to work toward a level playing field between mainstream and marginalized groups.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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. In- ductively 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 ar- chives, 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.

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.