Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs guest editors of 'Digital Crossings in Europe'

A special issue of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture was published recently, with Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi and Dr Koen Leurs as guest editors. The issue is entitled 'Digital Crossings in Europe' and explores the entanglement of digital media and migration - moving beyond a national and mono-ethnic focus.

Postcolonial digital humanities

This special issue of Crossings offers a panorama of studies and projects which partake in a critical reassessment of the enabling power of digital media and their divisive implications for new forms of surveillance, online racism and ‘economic’ inequality. The essays can be seen as postcolonial digital humanities studies. In 'Digital Crossings in Europe', several authors argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances. The authors study the entanglement of digital media and migration from a comparative and postcolonial framework, that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. An all too utopian notion of connectivity and borderlessness is carefully avoided, by using a critical approach to digital tools and highlighting the dyssymmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity.  

The guest editors

Sandra Ponzanesi is Head of Humanities at Utrecht University College (UCU), and Associate Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Critique at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme. She is the author of Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture (Suny 2004); Migrant Cartographies (Lexington Books 2005), Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge 2011), Deconstructing Europe (Routledge 2011), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave 2014) and Gender, Globalisation and Violence. Postcolonial Conflict Zones (Routledge 2014).

Koen Leurs is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, UK and affiliated with Icon, Institute for Cultural Inquiry/Gender Programme, Utrecht University. At the LSE he works on Urban Politics of London Youth Analyzed Digitally (UPLOAD). He is currently writing Digital Passages. How Diaspora, Gender and Youth Culture Intersect Online for Amsterdam University Press. From 2011-2013 he was a post-doctoral researcher for the 7th European Framework Programme Mig@Net, Transnational Digital Networks, Migration & Gender project. From 2008-2012 he conducted his PhD in Gender Studies at Utrecht University, participating in Wired Up. Digital Media as Innovative Socialisation Practices for Migrant Youth. He has published widely on digital networks, youth culture, multiculturalism, migration and gender.