This forward-looking Research Handbook showcases cutting-edge research on the relationship between international migration and digital technology. It sheds new light on the interlinkages between digitalisation and migration patterns and processes globally, capturing the latest research technologies and data sources. Featuring international migration in all facets from the migration of tech sector specialists through to refugee displacement, leading contributors offer strategic insights into the future of migration and mobility.
How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. This is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.
"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.
In The Young and the Digital, S. Craig Watkins skillfully draws from more than 500 surveys and 350 in-depth interviews with young people, parents, and educators to understand how a digital lifestyle is affecting the ways youth learn, play, bond, and communicate. Timely and deeply relevant, the book covers the influence of MySpace and Facebook, the growing appetite for “anytime, anywhere” media and “fast entertainment,” how online “digital gates” reinforce race and class divisions, and how technology is transforming America’s classrooms. Watkins also debunks popular myths surrounding cyberpredators, Internet addiction, and social isolation. The result is a fascinating portrait, both celebratory and wary, about the coming of age of the first fully wired generation.
This OA book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doing so, digital technologies create a whole new set of ethical and methodological challenges for migration studies: from data access to data interpretation, privacy protection, and research ethics more generally. Of specific concern are the aspects of digital migration researchers accessing digital platforms used by migrants, who are subject to precarious and insecure life circumstances, lack recognised papers and are in danger of being rejected and deported. Thus, the authors call for new modes of caring for (big) data when researching migrants' digital practices in the configuration of migration and borders. Besides taking proper care of research participants' privacy, autonomy, and security, this also spans carefully establishing analytically sustainable environments for the respective data sets. In doing so, the book argues that it is essential to carefully reflect on researchers' own positioning as being part of the challenge they seek to address.
This insightful book discusses how states deploy frontier and digital technologies to manage and control migratory movements. Assessing the development of blockchain technologies for digital identities and cash transfer; artificial intelligence for smart borders, resettlement of refugees and assessing asylum applications; social media and mobile phone applications to track and surveil migrants, it critically examines the consequences of new technological developments and evaluates their impact on the rights of migrants and refugees.
This Open Access book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doing so, digital technologies create a whole new set of ethical and methodological challenges for migration studies: from data access to data interpretation, privacy protection, and research ethics more generally. Of specific concern are the aspects of digital migration researchers accessing digital platforms used by migrants, who are subject to precarious and insecure life circumstances, lack recognised papers and are in danger of being rejected and deported. Thus, the authors call for new modes of caring for (big) data when researching migrants’ digital practices in the configuration of migration and borders. Besides taking proper care of research participants’ privacy, autonomy, and security, this also spans carefully establishing analytically sustainable environments for the respective data sets. In doing so, the book argues that it is essential to carefully reflect on researchers’ own positioning as being part of the challenge they seek to address.
Societies today are in a period of dynamic change, highly fluid and contested in moving from traditional to liberal and from local to global, as well as varying from highly developed to emerging market economies. Alongside and facilitating this is a rapidly and exponentially changing digital media industry, including new technologies, multi-platform distributions and advertising models. This monograph highlights, identifies, evaluates and provides rich insight into the complex nature and meaning of different digital value migration in media corporations and ICT companies. It illustrates how such values affect both the internal and the external environments of media companies and industries, as well as prosumers' consumption. Including chapters from expert scholars and industry practitioners representing cutting-edge research in the U.S. and Europe in the fields of digital convergence, broadband, media and information communication technology (ICT) business and technology, the book helps academics, researchers, media policymakers and corporate executives better understand today’s undulating media and ICT markets. Specifically, it illuminates where they have come from, what is at stake and what forces drive and constrain them in global hypercompetitive markets. Ultimately, it aims relatedly to facilitate high academic, business and professional standards. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and business and industry practitioners in digital media, media management, international business, media economics and media policy and, more broadly, to those in the cultural industries, strategic management, business studies and marketing.
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
This open access book covers the main issues, challenges and techniques concerning the application of qualitative methodologies to the study of migration. It discusses theoretical, epistemological and empirical questions that must be considered before, during, and after undertaking qualitative research in migration studies. It also covers recent innovative developments and addresses the key issues and major challenges that qualitative migration research may face at different stages i.e. crafting the research questions, defining approaches, developing concepts and theoretical frameworks, mapping categories, selecting cases, dealing with concerns of self-reflection, collecting and processing empirical evidence through various techniques, including visual data, dealing with ethical issues, and developing policy-research dialogues. Each chapter discusses relative strengths and limitations of qualitative research. The chapters also identify the main drivers for qualitative research development in migration studies. It is a unique volume as it brings together a multidisciplinary perspective as well as illustrations of different issues derived from the research experience of the recognized authors. One additional value of this book is its geographic focus on Europe. It seeks to explore theoretical and methodological issues that are raised by distinctive features of the European context. This volume will be a useful reference source for scholars and professionals in migration studies and in social sciences as well. The publication is also addressed to graduate and post-graduate students and, more generally, to those who embark on the task of doing qualitative research for the first time in the field of migration.
