Digital Strangers at Our Door: Moral Panic and the Refugee Crisis

The recent refugee crisis in Europe is the first of its kind in a fully digital age. This has meant that migrants have been able to use new digital affordances to aid themselves in risky transnational crossings, keeping in touch with the loved ones left behind but also with the peers who have successfully arrived in the destination countries. But the combination of technology and migration deserves further scrutiny as it has not only allowed for geographical distance to be bridged through digital proximity but also created new anxieties and fears. Recent media images of refugees reaching dry land and taking selfies, for example, has sparked heated debates on whether these refugees are worthy of aid and support (Chouliaraki, 2017; Risam, 2018, Ticktin, 2016). The assumption is that refugees should be innocent victims, helpless and disenfranchised in order to fit with the claim for humanitarian help bestowed by the West. Images of refugees as technologically savvy and digital natives have instead generated fear and anxiety about an invasion of bogus refugees feeding into ‘high tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2006, p. 73). The present intervention investigates how digital technologies have been used bottom up to offer new ways of communication and support to ‘connected migrants’ (Diminescu, 2008) versus the increased top down use of technologies for monitoring, surveillance and racial profiling done both by government organizations and by media at large. The idea is that technologies offer new tools for engaging in transnational cosmopolitan alliances but that the speed, uncontrollability and unpredictability of these flows have also generated new sources of anxiety and resistance to these strangers at our door as theorized by Zygmunt Bauman (2016). How do migrants and technology enhance this culture of anxiety in Europe? How is anxiety fomented in order to ‘frame’ migrants as new players in our risk society (Beck, 1992)

Digital Diasporas: Postcoloniality, Media and Affect

This essay revisits the notion of diaspora in connection with recent advancements in communication technologies, which have led to the formation of ‘digital diasporas’. The focus is on digital migrants as ‘connected users’, and therefore as participants in social media platforms. Though there is no consensus on what digital diaspora means exactly because it depends on its many disciplinary takes and media-specific variations, such as ‘e-diasporas’, ‘digital diasporas’, ‘net-diasporas’ and ‘web-diasporas’, there is consensus on the profound ways in which digital connectivity has transformed privileged terms of spatiality, belonging and self-identification. Digital diasporas provide new possible cartographies to map the self in relation to increasingly complex patterns of globalization and localization, while avoiding closures and the negative effects of identity politics. Furthermore, it allows different scripts to be envisioned for the politics of emotion that is essential to the understanding of the motives, nature and impact of the migrant experience, as well as the possibility for negotiating multiple belongings. The essay reviews some of the disciplinary or media-specific takes that have emerged from science and technology studies, media, communication studies and migration studies, anthropology and sociology. Offering a postcolonial intervention into this interdisciplinary field, the essay analyses ‘digital diaspora’ as a relational term that operates on three levels – Internet-specific, network-oriented and embedded in wider social practices – while also accounting for political, geographical and historical specificities

Somali diaspora and digital belonging: Introduction

This editorial introduces the theoretical framework, methodological approach and comparative themes of the Special Issue on ‘Somali Diaspora and Digital Practices: Gender, Media and Belonging’. The Special Issue proposes to connect the notion of the Somali diaspora to recent advancements in communication technologies, exploring the ways in which the Somali, specifically Somali women, keep in touch locally, nationally and transnationally through different forms of everyday digital practices. In particular for Somali migrant women, the use of digital media is highly embedded in their gendered roles as mothers, daughters, reunited wives, students and professionals, who keep the ties with the homeland and diaspora communities in diversified as well as collective ways. The close analysis of empirical findings across different sites in Europe shows multi-sitedness, generation and urban belonging as central features. These issues emerge as findings from a large ethnographic fieldwork carried out across European cities (Amsterdam, London and Rome).1 Ethnography offers an essential contribution in understanding social media practices as situated in specific social, geographical and political contexts, taking into account the intersectional dynamic of factors including gender, race, ethnicity, generation, religion and sexual orientation

Postcolonial Intellectuals: New Paradigms

The aim of this special issue is to gauge the impact of postcolonial intellectuals in contemporary Europe from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective. This is achieved by challenging the divide between public and private, inclusion and exclusion, and citizens and migrants, thereby creating counterpublics where sexual, ethnic, religious and other minorities stake their claims and play out their actions. For this purpose, the special issue will not review the standard figures in the postcolonial debate but focus on the ways in which intellectual labour is performed by critics as well as by artists, activists and writers, in order to recognize the impact of ‘intellectual engagements’ in the public sphere in their less visible and recognized manifestations as well

Crossfire: Postcolonial Theory between Marxist and Decolonial Critiques

This article stages a confrontation between postcolonial theory and the decolonial option on the terrain of their respective engagements with Marxism. While prominent decolonial critics accuse postcolonial theory of relying too much on ‘Eurocentric’ theories, including Western Marxism, the article argues that this critique ignores what has been in fact a long-standing debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics. Thus, the article questions this decolonial characterization and locates postcolonial theory itself in the crossfire of Marxist and decolonial critiques. First, it outlines the main objections that Marxist critics have formulated against postcolonial theory. Next, it discusses the decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory with an emphasis on the role played by Marxism in this confrontation. Finally, it proposes a ‘relinking’ between postcolonial theory and Marxism, understood not as a closure of the debate between these two theoretical formations but rather as an effort to hold that debate open. The article identifies the space of this open debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics as a vantage point from which to articulate a critical response to the decolonial intervention

Commentary: Digital diaspora as a travelling concept

This is a commentary to the Special Issue ‘Textures of Diaspora and (Post-) Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach’, edited by Shola Adenekan, Julia Borst and Linda Maeding. The commentary reflects on digital diaspora as a travelling concept, and considers the analytic scope of the terms post-migration, post-digital and post-global for digital diasporas studies. I argue digital diaspora studies can be situated in the following continuums: universal-particular, decentring‐recentering, global‐local, inclusion and exclusion as well as media-centrism and non-media-centrism. Future scholarship may listen better to the sounds of digital diasporas and attend to the implications of digital platformization