Title: Doing Digital Migration Studies: Introduction Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi
Abstract: In our contemporary world, migration and digital technologies mutually shape one another.They have historically always been intertwined, yet their dynamic relationship is constantly evolving.People on the move mediate their being and belonging in increasing conditions of datafication and digitization.Mobile devices, social media platforms and smartphone apps are used to shape the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process illustrate the proliferation of migration-related digital practices.These digital intensifications and accelerations also constitute a Janus-faced development for mobile people as they face increased forms of datafied migration management, algorithmic surveillance, control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.In this anthology, Doing Digital Migration Studies, we bring into focus, empirically trace and theorize the myriad everyday digital practices surrounding migration.A variety of concerns, debates and commitments are at stake when addressing digital migrant practices in their full complexity.Figure 0.1 is a visual rendering of the kaleidoscope of perspectives that can be mobilized to do digital migration studies.The visual harvest by the visual artist Renée van den Kerkhof captures the complex interplay between oppressive infrastructures reflecting migration regimes and the personal, affective and symbolic agency of everyday technology use.The figure is indicative of the great variety of themes covered in the papers presented at the April 2021 virtual conference Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday.With large parts of the world in lockdown as a result of the Covid-19 health pandemic, over the course of three days we held an online PhD workshop and had keynote talks by Paul Gilroy, Saskia Witteborn, Engin Isin, Larissa Hjorth and Nicholas de