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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?

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 ...

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.