International conference Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday
By Guanqin He, PhD candidate at Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University.
The intensified digitalization has impacted the everyday lives of migrants. Migrant belonging has been redefined as a way of being in the world that transcends borders, giving birth to new types of digital kinship, diasporic associations and transnational intimacy. In parallel, the transformations of technological innovation and experimentation have resulted in a proliferation of new digital platforms and apps, where migrants are transnationally connected, socialized and affiliated.
While emerging scholarship on digital migration is developing in parallel within the silos of specialized disciplines, we cannot understand the complexity of digital migration and migrant belongings from a single discipline or conceptual orientation. The international conference Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday held at Utrecht University sought to address this evolving dynamic by facilitating scholarly dialogue on connections and interactions between the media and migration from different disciplines. The conference paid specific attention to the everyday use of digital media as well as the role digital media play in local/ urban and national diasporic formations. The gathering was co-organized by Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs, as part of the ERC project CONNECTINGEUROPE, Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging in collaboration with the ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) Diaspora, Migration and the Media section.
An overview of the International conference Migrant Belongings
From April 21-23, the conference included five informative keynotes by Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London), Nicholas de Genova (University of Houston), Larrisa Hjorth (RMIT University), Saskia Witteborn (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Paul Gilroy (University College London). The keynote speakers brought together different perspectives which was further substantiated by the more than two hundred participants presenting their latest research findings and insights during different panels. Besides the keynotes and parallel sessions, a PhD workshop for young researchers was held, facilitated by Nishant Shah (ArtEz University of the Arts, Arnhem) and Saskia Witteborn as well as special roundtable sessions including a film screening of Bab Sebta and Q&A with the filmmaker Randa Maroufi. There was also a discussion between community workers of the Utrecht-based De Voorkamer and media makers including Shaker Productions.
The conference aims to provide a dialogue setting for scholars from all over the world to share their recent research on migration and the media in the context of cultural diversity, as well as to reflect on the new challenges and opportunities migrants may face with relating to the transformation of digital technology (see figure 2). In fact, the speakers involved come from a wide range of disciplines, investigating the digital practices of individual and collective users in the context of media studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies alongside geography, cultural anthropology and sociology. The issues of affect, gender, politics, power, identity, belongings and geographies within the everyday digital practices are negotiated and reevaluated across domains at this conference.
Rethinking digital practices in the post-pandemic era
Many elements of our lives have been recalibrated through digital practices during the times of COVID-19, that have brought new directions and inspirations to academia. At the conference, scholars from different fields presented their latest research related to the pandemic, rethinking and reviewing how digital media intervene and attune with transnational lives, emotional connections, political participation, diasporic community formation and migrant subjectification. The multi-dimensioned, interdisciplinary topics and insights in the meantime provoked more potentialities in the times of post-pandemic.
‘Digital media practices are about a process of continuity rather than disruption to everyday rhythms’, says Larissa Hjorth. She discussed the intergenerational differences in migrants’ use of digital media in her keynote Digital kinship: Understanding intergenerational care at a distance. Hjorthshared her ethnographic fieldworks in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne and illustrated complex ways in which care at distance can span the digital, social and physical worlds (see figure 3). However, Larissa Hjorth acknowledged that the pandemic has witnessed the amplification of digital inequality and the unevenness of digital literacy. Therefore, she laid out the vision that we might work together to create a more careful and thoughtful new normal that gives voice to the invisible forms of care involved in digital media.
Digital culture plays a complex role for the experiences of queer migrants. In the panels, Alejandra Castellanos Breton (EMMIR) reexamined the notion of home during the COVID-19 (A Homing Journey: Notions of Home during the COVID-19 pandemic). She proposed that the pandemic created a new space for the LGBTQI+ Erasmus Mundus master students to reconsider their sexualities in the context of family experience with themselves and their families. The pandemic in the meantime, deconstructed the romanticized and positive implications of home, instead accelerating their constant fear and discomfort, limiting their homing options as wanted. Hongwei Bao (University of Nottingham, UK)’s research Sharing Food and Intimacy Online: Being Queer and Chinese in Europe During the COVID-19 Pandemic provided an interesting insight that food could be a trope to imply issues of identity, culture and belonging. He explicated how two queer Chinese migrants who shared food and personal experiences to connect with the public online during the pandemic and built a transnational and cross-cultural mediated correlation. Hongwei Bao defined it as an important means of social activism, through which we pay more attention to the existing various forms of nationalism, xenophobia, anti-immigration and anti-Asian sentiments around the world.
Additionally, how are Kenyan refugees using technology to navigate inequalities during the pandemic is foregrounded in Herve Nicolle (Samuel)’s presentation Technology in disrupting existing inequalities among refugees in Kenya amidst COVID-19. By establishing a digital marketplace for the sale of artisanal products made by refugees, the Norwegian Refugee Council helped refugees set up a self-organizing, self-operating business to face the existing digital barriers and employment difficulty. The emergence of COVID-19 has changed their means to access to computers and the Internet, relying on Community Technology Access centers. The intervention of Wi-Fi has transcended the physical distance and created new business opportunities for refugees.
In another keynote titled Digital Citizen Yet to Come, Engin Isin held that digital citizens can be effectively shaped into collective political subjects by making digital rights claims (see figure 4). He gave an account of the tension between the digital acts of making rights claims, elaborating the paradoxical relationships between the closure that turning over control of the Internet conventions to governments and corporations and the acts of opening through which people set new terms and conventions, iterate, cite, or resignify old conventions. Isin in the end made an appeal to call for digital citizen yet to come to maintain that making rights claim signify openings rather than closing. This is an important and aspirational principle. The openness of platforms and conventions brings about significant possibilities and potentialities than closure.
In this sense, Cathrine Bublatzky (Heidelberg Center) raised her attention to the transformation of migratory citizenship in times of COVID-19, addressing that the new dimensions of mobility and the increasing use of online media has triggered a complex dynamic citizenship. In her presentation, Cathrine has reopened the question to scrutiny that how migrants’ participation as digital citizens and empowerment of individuals through solidarity and online communities gave rise to the new forms of memory and migrant intimacy.
International Network: light the way for the young PhDs
It is worth mentioning that for young researchers, the PhD workshop held before the formal conference, is extremely an informative and inspiring session (see figure 5). Facilitated by Nishant Shah and Saskia Witteborn, organized by Melis Mevsimler (Utrecht University) and Philipp Seufferling (Södertörn University), the workshop focused on how to position yourself in a competitive job market and how to be well-prepared in a job search. Nishant and Saskia shared not only their own experiences and insights about academia today, but also abundant useful links and resources, through which young PhD researchers can find many beneficial and interesting workshops and seminars. In addition, Nishant and Saskia also discussed the issue of paper publication. Saskia suggested that young researchers should focus on both general journals and specific journals, and some special issues could also be targeted for submission. Researchers from different disciplines shared some journals that could be used as reference. At the end of the seminar, PhD students posted their twitter handles in succession for further network and collaboration.
All in all, the international conference Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday at Utrecht University has led to a variety of fruitful and inspiring presentations, sessions and discussions. Although held over digital platforms including Zoom and Gather.town in light of the Covid-19 restrictions, the conference created a dialogue setting for scholars to exchange recent visions across disciplines, and in the meantime, these explorations appropriately illustrated the multiplicity and complexity of migration issues in today's digital age. In the post-epidemic era, everyday practices regarding migration and digital media may give rise to more up-to-date socio-cultural issues, as well as more opportunities and challenges. This international conference could be understood as a transit where not only reflexively reviewed the insights of scholars in various fields on migration and the media in recent years, but also initiated more possibilities. Just as Engin Isin put it in the keynote, possibilities and potentialities are much appreciated for today and for the future.
