Publication:

 

Publication:

Special Issue: 

 

Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday

Guest editors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
Communication, Culture & Critique, 15(2), 2022: 103-298. 

 https://academic.oup.com/ccc/issue/15/2

 

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.”

 

Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs

Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday (open access)

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac016

 

Paul Giroy - University College London, UK (open access) View article

Working with “Wogs”: Aliens, Denizens and the Machinations of Denialism

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac012

 

Nicholas De Genova - University of Houston, USA View article

Viral borders:  Migration, Deceleration, and the Re-Bordering of Mobility During the COVID-19 Pandemic https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac009

 

Saskia Witteborn - The Chinese University of Hong Kong View article

Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication: The "Three D" Transformation of Forced Migration Management. https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac007

 

Martina Tazzioli - Goldsmiths University of London, UK View article

Extractive Humanitarianism: Participatory Confinement and Unpaid Labour in Refugees Governmentality https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac018

 

Roopika Risam - Salem State University, USA View article

Border of Affect: Mobilizing Border Imagery as Civic Engagement

  https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac005

 

Christine Quinan– Melbourne University, Australia, and Mina Hunt, - Utrecht University, The Netherlands View article

Biometric Bordering and Automatic Gender Recognition: Challenging Binary Gender Norms in Everyday Biometric Technologies

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac013

 

Larissa Hjorth - RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia View article

Careful Digital Kinship: Understanding Multispecies Digital Kinship, Choreographies of Care and Older Adults During the Pandemic in Australia

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac008

 

Earvin Cabalquinto - Deakin University, Australia View article

“Come On, Put Viber, We Can Drink Coffee Together”: The Ageing Migrant’s (Im)mobile Intimacy in Turbulent Times" 

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac011

 

Forum Section:

 

Laura Candidatu and Sandra Ponzanesi - Utrecht University, NL View article

Digital Diaspora: Staying with the Trouble

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac010

 

Myria Georgiou - London School of Economics, UK View article

Digital (In-)visibilities: Spatializing and Visualizing Politics of Voice

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac003

 

Lukasz Szulc - University of Sheffield, UK View article

A Lot of Straddling and Squirming. Taking Queer Migrant Stories Beyond the Academic Walls

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac006

 

Realene Wilding and Monika Winarnita - La Trobe University, Australia View article

Affect, Creativity and Migrant Belonging

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac015

 

Koen Leurs and Philip Seuferling - Utrecht University and Sodertorn University View article

Migration and the ‘deep time’ of media infrastructures 

https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1093/ccc/tcac019

 

Conference

Postcolonial Publics: 

Art and Citizen Media in Europe
Ca' Foscari, Venice on the 26-27th of May 2022

NWO (PIN) Project:

Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics Network 

 

 

  

Keynote talks by: Lilie Chouliaraki (London School of Economics) Vittorio Longhi (Journalist) Frances Negron-Muntaner (Columbia University Andrea Segre (Film director) Our Venice conference is devoted to the role of art and citizen media in shaping what we can call 'postcolonial publics' in Europe today. In this conference we interrogate the proliferation of digital media and global culture, and the changes happening in public intellectual engagements. From the adoration of the single (often male, often white) genius to the anonymity of diverse, affective publics, a postcolonial perspective invites contemporary public engagement to have many faces and multiple voices, and addressing new issues such as the environmental crisis and the resurgence of racism. Creativity and art can play a significant role in this development. Performance and visual expressions in the European space interpellate the situated public, but also produce transnational political dialogue and travel across digital space. Embodied performances challenge the cerebral stereotype and classical conception of what public engagement is and should be. Moreover, digital platforms have made available space for expressions that break the form and formulas of public and political speech. However, despite the expansion of public participation, social divisions based on race, gender, sexuality and able-bodiedness still hold sway and begs the question of positionality in relations to institutions, in the different fields of art and media, when it comes to political and social change. The various presentations envision postcolonial citizen media and art as practices and products encompassing a wide range of expressions: from poetry to journalism to Twitter-writing; from art to graffiti to Instagram-activism; and from celebrity activism to the uprising of “affective publics”.   This conference is jointly organized by Shaul Bassi and Sabrina Marchetti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Bolette Blaagaard (Aalborg University) and Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University) as the concluding event of the Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics Network (PIN) funded by the NWO. Info about the previous conferences can be found here: Previous conferences of the PIN Network: Utrecht University (5-6 February 2019): info University of Muenster (5-6 September 2019) – In collaboration with the University of Lisbon: info University of Leeds (21-22 and 28-29 January 2021): info The conference is free but to reserve your seat use this form. For more information and the full programme, see here.

The publication and conference is part of the Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics Network, (PIN), which is funded by the NWO. The network brings together international and interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and artists to explore the changing face and voice of the European intellectuals in a postcolonial Europe. This publication and conference are jointly organized by Shaul Bassi and Sabrina Marchetti (Centre for the Humanities and Social Change), Bolette Blaagaard (Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Copenhagen) and Sandra Ponzanesi (Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University).

The conference will take place in Venice on the 26-27th of May 2022. The publication based on the conference papers will follow soon after. Authors selected for the volume will be invited to the conference to present the final drafts of their papers. The volume will be published by Ca’ Foscari University Press as Open Access eBook in the Summer 2022.

                           Image credit: Lynn Avadenka, Afterword (Living Under Water, 2020)

 
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).

Abstracts should be submitted electronically, using the online submission system by 15 February 2021.

• 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.

For further questions please mail: migrantbelongings@uu.nl
The PDF of this call for papers is available here.