Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

‘On digital crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond the national and mono-ethnic focus. We argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances, opting for a comparative and postcolonial framework that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. Internet applications make it possible to sustain new forms of diaspora and networks, which operate within and beyond Europe, making issues of ethnicity, nationality, race and class not obsolete but transformed. It is therefore important and timely to analyse how these reconfigurations take place and affect everyday life. Using a critical approach to digital tools that avoids utopian notions of connectivity and borderlessness, this article highlights the dyssymmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity. It further introduces the different contributions to the special issue, making connections and tracing relations among themes and methods and sketching main patterns for further research. It also offers a panorama of other related studies and projects in the field, which partake in a critical reassessment of the enabling power of digital media and their divisive implications for new forms of surveillance, online racism and ‘economic’ inequality, which we gather under the heading of postcolonial digital humanities.

Drawing mainly on the e-Diasporas Atlas project (www.e-diasporas.fr), this article seeks to understand how the web has affected diasporic self-representations. More specifically, by engaging with both media theory and migration studies, it addresses the new modes of boundary formations that arise in the context of migration flows, and how these are mediated by the web. It sheds light on two main levels of online diasporic identity-building. The first can be situated firmly within a paradigm of ‘graphic reason’, and relates to the socio-semiotic traces documented on diasporic websites. The second examines traces of another kind, which are formed by the hyperlinked networks of e-Diasporas on the web, and which can be situated within a paradigm of ‘digital reason’. Some of the consequences for diasporic identity-formation are drawn out, particularly issues relating to strategies of visibility on the web.

This article proposes points of departure for researching the circulation and assemblage of racist ideas and racializing discourses in the trans-media space of interactive, hybrid digital media. It contends that racist mobilizations are increasingly invested in organized and opportunistic communicative actions that depend on the integration of interactive digital media to a wider media ecology and European political environment. Further, if social media can be understood as a constant ‘invitation to discourse’, then they also provide an invitation to discourse on the nature and scope of racism in a putatively ‘post-racial’ era. In contending that the affordances and dynamics of social media networks are politically generative in relation to the politics of racism, it proposes working with malleable resources in the sociology of racism to develop approaches that are not limited to the established focus on extremist sites, but that can account both for the circuitries of digital media exchange and the particularities of regional racial formations.

Contemporary societies are embedded in three interrelated processes: increasing mobility, digital connectivity and the consolidation of a service-based economy. In this context, a migration industry of connectivity (MIC) emerges as a set of private ventures offering services to migrants to enable them to keep in touch with loved ones at a distance. This article has a double purpose: first, it argues that the MIC is a powerful theoretical concept to analyse contemporary migratory processes. Second, it illustrates this empirically through ten company spokespersons’ accounts and a critical discourse analysis of eighteen corporate online texts of mobile telephony and money transfer services that target immigrants in Europe. Conclusions suggest that these discourses offer migrants alternative subjectivities across the lines of consumption, citizenship and ethnic identity, often neglected within the broader field of public discourses, such as the mass media and parliamentary debate. This situates the MIC as an emerging powerful actor in a discursive arena traditionally dominated by governmental bodies.

Despite being caught in cycles of waiting and being arrested in institutionalized accommodations, forced migrants engage increasingly in digital border crossings. While the study of digital practice has attracted much scholarly interest, the role of emotions in processes of migration and digital connecting has been neglected. This article explores the role of emotions in the structuring of and engagement with digital heterotopias. Field research with 127 forced migrants in Germany over a period of three years illustrates how shame and fear structure digital practice and heterotopic space and regulate digital connectivity. The study suggests that emotions are instrumental in gendering digital practice and influencing solidarization processes, with shame and fear strengthening spaces of exclusion and supporting the logics of control by the nation state.

This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants stranded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia feel about staying in touch with loved ones abroad using Internet-based transnational communication. Left-behind during transit migration from Somalia to overseas, at this moment they can only digitally connect with contacts living inside for example dreamed diasporic locations in Europe. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group and concept maps drawn by informants the ambivalent workings of affects spurred by transnational communication are explored. The intense feelings of togetherness originating in Skype video-chat, mobile phone calls and Facebook use are conceptualized with the notion of transnational affective capital – one of the only sources of capital the informants have. The ambivalence of transnational affective capital is scrutinized by exploring whether such connectivity routines offer trust, enable anxiety management and promote ‘ontological security’. Alternatively, the question arises whether transnational communication may further exacerbate ontological insecurity: discomfort, unsettlement and increased anxiety related to the precarious situation of being stranded.

This article explores the ways in which Norwegians of African descent explore their relationship with the African diaspora through the multimodal practices of digital online media. Through the stories of two young Norwegian women the article examines how community, ties and ways of belonging are envisioned at both the local and the transnational levels, and at the intersection between online and offline spaces. These stories are drawn from a larger digital ethnography of the African diaspora in Norway. The article underlines the need to locate understandings of ‘diaspora’ and the ‘digital’ within relations and positionalities in specific national contexts and spaces. The article aims to add to the existing literature on how diasporas in general and African diasporas in particular are technologically mediated.

This article examines the ways in which classed distinctions are related to the construction of increasingly cosmopolitan identities on Social Networking Sites (SNSs) amongst Mexican migrants from relatively privileged backgrounds living in Europe. It centres on how user demographics shape many of the concerns and outcomes pertaining to the use of SNSs. It considers the implications of the fact that SNSs are predominantly used by a demographic considered as non-marginalized, mobile and as possessing relatively privileged economic, cultural and social backgrounds. It analyses the ways in which online identities are constructed on SNS profiles using multimedia content to represent specific lifestyles and cultural practices that are used to make distinctions amongst participants, and are related to social, cultural and economic capital. A critical analysis is presented as to how users represent cosmopolitan identities online through the display of tastes and lifestyles in SNS content and into how these representations relate to users’ privileged positions in Mexican society. Bourdieu’s concept of distinction is used to emphasize the utility of considering different forms of capital in analysing the use of SNSs and profile content generated by a specific demographic. This article demonstrates how the analysis of SNS use may contribute towards an understanding of how classed distinctions are made based on this use and of how users negotiate the posting of profile content according to these distinctions and manage (select, edit and share) their representations.

This article discusses existing approaches to ethnic community building in diaspora and suggests that the concept of ‘cultural thickening’ can be useful for the understanding of ethnicity in a ‘mediatized world’. It is argued that in everyday life, ethnicity is continuously being (re-)constructed through repetitive practices of mediated and non-mediated communication, through which ethnic boundary-making takes place. This theoretical framework is then discussed through the cases of four diasporic websites of the Moroccan and Turkish diaspora that are analysed through media ethnography. It is argued, firstly, that communication spaces for negotiations about ethnicity are expanded by these websites. Through debates on ‘banal’ practices of everyday life relating to different fields such as cooking, sports or education among others, the users of the websites discuss who belongs to their community and what it means to belong to the community. Second, using these diasporic websites becomes a shared characteristic of the ethnic community in the eyes of the members of diasporas.

This study investigates visualized identities of ‘former Yugoslav’ migrant women in the Netherlands. Ten women with roots in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia were asked to depict their identities in a series of photographs over the course of one week. Subsequently they were prompted to contextualize their photographs during an individual ‘photo-elicitation’ interview. The author identifies four modes of photographic self-representation by means of a step-wise analysis of the 1175 photographs: archival photos, self-portraits, still lifes and snapshots. The study shows how the four modes are used to visualize different intersecting identities. It appears that conviviality, togetherness, is one of the main features in their visualized identities. Moreover, the photographs not only mediate the people, events and objects of the migrants’ lived cultures but also elements of the research project in itself.

Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics and Community, A. Alonso and A. Oiarzabal (eds) (2010) Reno: University of Nevada Press, pp. 288, ISBN 10: 0874178150 (pbk), €36.28

Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement, J. Brinkerhoff (2009) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 288, ISBN 10: 0521741432 (pbk), €22.30

Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, M. Madianou and D. Miller (2012) London: Routledge, pp. 192, ISBN 10: 041567929X (pbk), €26.52

Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants, R. Trandafoiu (2013) Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 212, ISBN 10: 0857459430 (hbk), €47.93

Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference, Myria Georgiou (2013) Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 216 pp., ISBN-13: 9780745648569, £15.99