Digital migration
The special interest group ‘Digital Migration’ seeks to establish an interdisciplinary, university-wide platform for studying the interrelationships between digitalisation and migration. Digital migration will be developed as a multi-perspectival, multi-scalar, multi-stakeholder research agenda.
Drastic changes
Digitisation and migration are fundamental drivers of economic, cultural, societal, and political transformation – however we need a better understanding of how these two processes are interrelated. In recent years the scale, intensity, and types of migration and digitisation have drastically changed.
These transformations have resulted in a proliferation of institutionalised forms of migration governance, control and management based on technological innovation and experimentation. In parallel, increased digitalisation has impacted the everyday experiences of migrants, think about the digital connections maintained by expatriate knowledge workers as well as precarious forced migrants with their countries of origin as well as the transnational diaspora.
Multi-disciplinary perspective
Emerging scholarship on digital migration is developing in parallel within the silos of specialised disciplines. However, the complexity of digital migration cannot be properly understood from one single privileged discipline, conceptual orientation or methodological approach. Attention is also needed for the impact across the local, national, transnational and international scales.
This Special Interest Group therefore seeks to establish a space of exchange to bring together perspectives from fields including media, communication, gender, anthropology, migration, sociology, education and computation.