Digitalization and new technologies fundamentally impact the construction and maintenance of identities and communities. In today’s networked world, digital platforms, devices, and networks enable migrants, diasporas, and other mobile people to stay digitally connected with families, friends, communities, and associations across distances. Digitalization challenges the notion of migration as a linear movement between two places. Instead, it creates new kinds of spaces for migrant connectivity that transcend time and place. These spaces often materialize in the form of websites, social media platforms, discussion forums, and smartphone apps that facilitate communication, access to information and resources, community-building as well as social and political organization. While digitalization breaks down many barriers, it also produces new limitations and challenges, such as digital divides, platform dependencies, and new forms of gatekeeping.
This panel explores how individuals and communities engage with digital platforms and technologies in the context of migration, while also considering how these technologies shape and influence those very same processes. Topics may include, but are not limited to, everyday digital practices of migrants and migrant communities, the role of social media in maintaining transnational ties, digital expressions of identity and belonging, online activism as well as the challenges and restrictions related to digital connectivity. The panel particularly welcomes contributions that examine the influence of digital infrastructures and their communicative and technological affordances on identity- and community-building. The panel invites scholars from various disciplines to submit empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions. Presentations can be held in English and Finnish. If presenting in Finnish, please consider the non-Finnish-speaking audience (e.g. by preparing presentation slides in both Finnish and English).
Language of session: Finnish and English.