Journal of Global Diaspora & Media - Migrations, Diasporas and Media, Jul 2023

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests during the summer of 2020 provide an opportunity to reassess the relations between African Americans, Caribbean and African immigrants. I argue that while the social justice protests galvanized the Black community to fight against police brutality and systemic racism, the process began earlier and was significantly impacted by the advent of social media. Using Stuart Hall’s work as a framework, I argue that in today’s digital environment, celebrity influencers such as Barack Obama, Beyonce, Trevor Noah and Rihanna have used their formidable social media platforms to upend racially divisive media messaging about cultural identities of African Americans, Caribbean and African immigrants. I also explore broadening the concept of cultural intermediaries to recognize these influencers who bypass traditional intermediaries and connect directly with their followers to bridge the cultural identity divide.

With Biden’s election in 2020, the United States and the world anticipated a major shift in US immigration policy and a different approach to the US–Mexico border crisis. This study examines how media covered this through a textual analysis of 40 news stories published by the New York Times (NYT) between November 2020 and November 2021. It identifies four categories of content: ‘the Biden presidency – an era of hope and positive change’; ‘causes and complexities of the southern border crisis’; ‘critique of the Biden presidency’ and ‘migrant journeys, of confusion, suffering and hope’. Subcategories are also developed for these categories. The findings indicate that though violence in Central America is still a primary driver leading to a migrant surge at the US southern border, climate crises and the COVID-19 pandemic are two major events causing more migrations from Central America as well as bringing in new migrants to the United States from other countries around the world. The study shows that though the NYT does not portray the migrants negatively and offers some context about the causes of the crisis and a critique of the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis, the reporting lacks a long-term perspective about the deeper causes of the crisis.

Drawing on the highly mediatized arrival of migrants and refugees at the borders of Greece, this article focuses on digital technologies and smartphone use among Syrian refugees in Athens, Greece, and analyses the way family relations are experienced at a distance. It is based on ethnographic research carried out in the refugee camp of Eleonas, from July 2019 to March 2020, when the first wave of COVID-19 was confirmed in Greece. The main objective of the article is to discuss the way digital technologies help the refugees to redefine relationships among family members and experience a sense of ‘togetherness’ at a distance. In addition, it aims to describe the changes of the familial ties and the practices of an ‘imaginary family’ through smartphones and network platforms. Overcoming uncertainty, fear and ‘information precarity’ caused by the dataveillance and control of al-Assad’s governmental authorities, Syrian refugees find ways to use smartphone as ‘an essential tool’ to facilitate communication among family members and relatives in homeland or in diaspora in Europe, to share experiences, comments and pictures.

Diaspora and diasporic media have been studied consistently. As research subjects, however, their transition to, or creation on, digital platforms makes it increasingly ambiguous to distinguish digital diaspora from digital diasporic media. This study examines literature on digital diaspora and digital diasporic media and explores this ambiguity by looking at how these two research subjects have been conceptualized and methodologically approached. Referring to Candidatu, Leurs and Ponzanesi’s typology of digital diaspora research, this study concludes that the ambiguity is associated with shifting research paradigms in both internet and digital diaspora studies. The study further offers new insights that digital diaspora and digital diasporic media diverge on the projects each pursues and the nature of content each delivers, but converge on ‘media’ in the age of social media and the increasingly transcultural initiatives of these media. The study also offers the areas of further research that emerge from this ambiguity.

The challenges of covering COVID-19 have been the focus of scholarly attention since the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organization in 2020. However, we have little understanding of how external and internal factors influenced journalistic role conception from the perspectives of African diaspora journalists. Using journalistic role conception and perceived influence frameworks, this study examines whether what African diaspora journalists in the United Kingdom and Germany say about the factors that influenced their journalistic role conception matches with what they actually do through focus group discussions (FGDs) and content analysis of news stories in two media for and by African diasporas between March 2020 and August 2021. The findings show that five external factors (lockdown restrictions, fake news, effects of COVID-19 in the Black communities, economic model and official/non-official sources) and two internal factors (dominant framing of Africa and reorganization) mostly influenced journalistic role conception during the pandemic and that there was evidence to suggest that what they say they experienced (narrated role) matched with what they actually do (practised role).

Review of: Nigeria’s Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy and Participation, Farooq A. Kperogi (2020)

Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 312 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-58046-982-1, h/bk, USD 98.48