Abstract: The subject of global migration defies containment as it morphs across and between geographies, actors, structures and processes. While there have been dramatic changes in the directions of transnational mobility, dominant discourse about migrants has historically reproduced forms of linearity, dichotomy, universality and hierarchy. To study a complex subject characterized by asymmetry and volatility requires engagement with the multiple sites and modalities under which its emergence is constituted. How do we decenter default positions and delve into the serious project of deprovincializing methods? This talk will offer reflections on maintaining an alignment between our theoretical and methodological choices in order to produce knowledge about the politics and lived experiences of precarity in the contemporary global landscape.

Bio: Radha S. Hegde is a Professor in the department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Mediating Migration (Polity Press, 2016), editor of Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (NYU Press, 2011), and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of the Indian diaspora (Routledge, 2017). She has served as the co-editor of Feminist Media Studies.

Abstract: While images of migration and destitution have consistently been spectacularized in the mainstream media, the voices, representations and practices of migrant themselves have often been relegated to alternative channels and reporting outlets, from the press to photography, cinema and social media. At the height of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the digital passage to Europe has highlighted the savviness and skills of migrants, often digital natives themselves, in resorting to digital media to manage their journey by retrieving information, accessing GPS and routing data, contacting smugglers, carrying out economic transactions, integrating into new forms of governance (Latonero and Kift, 2018; Gillespie et al., 2018; Smets and Leurs, 2018; Paz Alencar, 2018; Georgiou 2019). However, less attention has been paid to the ‘banal’ ways in which migrants use digital technologies to keep in touch and stay connected with their peers and loved ones, through co-presence and diasporic affiliations that sustain bonds and forms of belonging across space and time (Madianou and Miller, 2012; Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015; Alinjead and Ponzanesi, 2020). Going beyond “high tech orientalism” (Chun, 2006) and “symbolic bordering” (Chouliaraki, 2017), this lecture will focus on the ways in which migrants appropriate and integrate digital technologies in their everyday lives in order to manage their local and transnational networks of belonging as media users, participants and content makers. What kinds of methods and tools would be useful to investigate these practices, keeping in mind affective, ethical and technological dimensions? Why foreground the everyday rather than the newsworthy and the state of exception? What kinds of affordances and platforms do we focus on and how do we facilitate articulation in preference to representation? What kinds of collaborative, creative or mixed methodologies do we review or develop before engaging with research on media and migration? Drawing from gender, postcolonial studies, digital media and migration this lecture focuses on the various forms of cosmopolitan belongings that cut across borders and media platforms.

Bio: Sandra Ponzanesi is the Chair and Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is PI of the ERC project “Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging” CONNECTINGEUROPE. The project investigates the relation between migration and digital technologies, focusing on how digital diasporas are created and performed in relation to issues of gender, ethnicity and affective belonging. It explores the way in which the ‘connected migrant’ contributes to new forms of European integration and cosmopolitan citizenship. Her publications include: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny, 2004), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014), and Gender, Globalisation and Violence (Routledge, 2014). She co-edited Migrant Cartographies (Lexington Books, 2005), Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012), Deconstructing Europe (Routledge, 2012), Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016) and Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). She has also guest-edited several special issues on Europe, digital migration and cinema for peer-reviewed journals such as Social Identities, Crossings, Interventions, Transnational Cinemas, Popular Communication, Television and New Media, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Abstract: This presentation interrogates the political economy of labour and the modes of value extraction which are at play in refugee governmentality. It advances the notion of “extractive humanitarianism” to designate the central role played by data extraction and knowledge extraction operations in refugee governmentality. The talk focuses on Cash Assistance Programme for asylum seekers to data extraction activities in refugee camps in Greece, and explores the labour economies at stake there. It proposes to complement migration studies literature on labour and critical security studies works on digital technologies with feminist political theories on unpaid labour. It moves on by analysing multiple data extraction processes which are at stake in refugee humanitarianism. The second part focuses on knowledge extraction operations and on the unpaid labour that asylum seekers are nudged to do in refugee camps and hotspots in the name of their own good. In so doing, it argues, asylum seekers are asked to participate to their own confinement, that is to mechanisms of “participatory detention”. I will conclude by speaking about the invisible labour that humanitarian actors need to do in order to keep digital infrastructures up to date.

Bio: Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Politics and Technology at Goldsmith University.

Abstract: Building on several mostly audience-centred studies on migration and visual cultures, I discuss in this presentation a range of methodological reflections. These reflections are intended to develop strategies to (a) overcome methodological nationalism; (b) avoid ethnocentrism as well as (c) mediacentrism. Inspired by my ongoing research, I will also share some reflections on participatory methods and visual methods and how to mobilize them in the context of migration and diaspora.”

Bio: Kevin Smets is assistant professor of media and culture at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). His work focuses on the intersections between media, migration and conflict. He is the vice-chair of the Diaspora, Migration & Media division of the European Communication Research & Education Association (ECREA) and recently co-edited the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

Abstract: This talk revisits questions of voice in the context of the digital border and the intensified securitisation of migration. Drawing on the methodological journey of the project 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴? 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘨𝘦, this talk will raise urgent questions about the ethics and politics of research on migration. Questioning not only the ethics of 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 in migration research, but also the politics of 𝘩𝘰𝘸 researchers and actors of migration speak, this talk will ask if and when research becomes complicit to a digital order of migration and when does it challenge it.

Bio: Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics . She researches and teaches on migration and urbanization in the context of intensified mediation. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, she is committed to putting the human of the urban, transnationally connected world at the core of her research. Specifically, in research conducted across 6 countries over the last 20 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity. Georgiou is the author and editor of four books and more than sixty peer-reviewed publications. Her work has been published in English, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Greek. She has also worked as a consultant for a number of regional and international organizations, most importantly the Council of Europe on three different projects. She has written for and been interviewed by a number of national and international media, while, before becoming a full-time academic, she worked as a journalist for BBC World Service, Greek press, and the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation.