Koen Leurs - Böcker

Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices.,Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments, be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of 'the migrant' and 'the digital'. The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts. I. The emphasis on reflective ‘doing’ of digital migration studies. So far scholarship in this interdisciplinary focus area has remained relatively silent on the topic of accountability and questions of decision making in the research process. II. The truly transdisciplinary and international scope of the volume distinguishes this volume from the disciplinary oriented special issues and monographs published in the field of media and communication, anthropology, migration studies and refugee studies. Digital migration 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. III. The innovative emphasis on everyday lived experiences and practices sheds much needed light on the ways in which increasingly documented infrastructures of datafication and digitization are lived, negotiated and contested. For this purpose, the volume 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 technologies such as social media and smartphones 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.

Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingly digitally tracked and surveilled, and national and international policy-making draws on data on migrant movement, anticipated movement, and biometrics to maintain a sense of control over the mobilities of humans and things. Also, social imaginaries are constituted in highly mediated environments where information and emotions on migration are constantly shared on social and traditional media. Both, those migrating and those receiving them, turn to media and communicative practices to learn how to make sense of migration and to manage fears and desires associated with cross-border mobility in an increasingly porous but also controlled and divided world.

The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration offers a comprehensive overview of media and migration through new research, as well as a review of present scholarship in this expanding and promising field. It explores key interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies, and how these are challenged by new realities and the links between contemporary migration patterns and its use of mediated processes. Although primarily grounded in media and communication studies, the Handbook builds on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, urban studies, science and technology studies, human rights, development studies, and gender and sexuality studies, to bring to the forefront key theories, concepts and methodological approaches to the study of the movement of people.

In seven parts, the Handbook dissects important areas of cross-disciplinary and generational discourse for graduate students, early career researcher, migration management practitioners, and academics in the fields of media and migration studies, international development, communication studies, and the wider social science discipline.

Part One: Keywords and Legacies

Part Two: Methodologies

Part Three: Communities

Part Four: Representations

Part Five: Borders and Rights

Part Six: Spatialities

Part Seven: Conflicts

“A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars… It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things.” - Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong “A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border.” - Myria Georgiou, LSE “A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration… The book is poised to become a touchstone text.” - C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a 'smart' disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex. This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From 'top-down' governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the 'bottom-up' of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores: The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication. Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks. Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted. The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life. How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research. The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers. Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives. Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress.

“A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars… It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things.” - Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong “A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border.” - Myria Georgiou, LSE “A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration… The book is poised to become a touchstone text.” - C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a 'smart' disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex. This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From 'top-down' governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the 'bottom-up' of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores: The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication. Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks. Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted. The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life. How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research. The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers. Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives. Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress.

This volume is a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture.