Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday has been postponed to Spring 2021.
The conference will now be fully online. Updates will be posted regularly on the conference page: http://connectingeuropeproject.eu/home/conference/
The new submission deadline for panels is
31 January 2021. Abstracts can be submitted until 15 February 2021. For
submission guidelines see below.
Call for papers
Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of
being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms
of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in
ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication
technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the
question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps
are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social
worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.
This international conference focuses on the connection between the
media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points.
Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and
personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the
local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of
migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also
subjects individuals as well as groups to increased datafied migration
management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as
forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.
This conference pays particular attention to the everyday use of
digital media for the support of transnational lives, emotional bonds
and cosmopolitan affiliations, focusing also on the role digital media
play in shaping local/urban and national diasporic formations. This is
because it becomes increasingly important to give everyday digital media
usage a central role in investigations of transnational belonging,
digital intimacy, diasporic community (re)production, migrant subject
formation, long-distance political participation, urban social
integration and local/national self-organization.
Therefore we need to examine individual and collective user practices
within the wider historical and cultural contexts of media studies,
cultural studies and postcolonial cultural studies scholarship, attuned
to issues of politics and power, identity, geographies and the everyday.
This also creates new challenges for cross-disciplinary dialogues that
require an integration of ethnography with digital methods and critical
data studies in order to look at the formation of identity and
experience, representation, community building, and creating spaces of
belongingness.
Contributions are welcome from any field of study that engages with
questions about how technology and social media usages mediate
contemporary migration experiences, not only within media and
communication studies, or digital and internet studies but also in
neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, postcolonial studies,
gender studies, race studies, psychology, law, visual studies, conflict
studies, criminology, sociology, critical theory, political theory and
international relations.
Contributions that explore non-media-centric entry points by focusing
on users’ digital practices and foregrounding ethnographic exploration
as a uniting framework are especially welcome.
The conference is part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging.
The conference is organized in collaboration with the DMM section (Diaspora, Migration and the Media) of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education).
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Affective digital practices and the politics of emotion
- Digital diaspora
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cities and urban belonging
- Translocality and transnationalism
- Co-presence and togetherness
- Cultural capital
- Migrant visualization
- Appification of migration
- Platformization of migrant lives
- Gender and critical race
- The migration industry of connectivity
- Digital ethnography
- Transnational authoritarianism
- Networked conflicts
- Datafication and surveillance
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Submissions for panels should be submitted via e-mail to migrantbelongings@uu.nl by 31 January 2021.
- Submission for panels should include a chairperson, a rationale for the panel (250 words), and the names of three speakers including their abstract (250 words) and biographical note (150 words).
- Submissions for papers should include an abstract (max 300 words) and short biographical note (150 words) about the author including her/his current position and interest in the field of digital media and migration.
The PDF of this call for papers is available here.
