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This article explores how smartphone videos produced by migrants during border crossings challenge Eurocentric visualizations of borders. Implementing video analysis and iconographic interpretation, I explore three interrelated aspects of the smartphone videos: (1) By circulating videos via digital platforms, migrants create a countervisuality of border crossing that destabilizes the visual politics that shape current border regimes. (2) Unlike journalistic, humanitarian, or surveillance-oriented visual images produced from above, from a safe distance, from rescue or patrol ships, migrants' smartphone footage puts their own narratives at the center of visualization. (3) Whereas Eurocentric visualizations of migration and borders aim to elicit affects and emotions such as pity, empathy, fear, or panic, migrants' smartphone videos depict emotions such as joy and happiness after successful border crossings. These affective visualizations of individual migration stories confound binary representations of migrants as either victims or invaders. I argue that the shaky smartphone videos with their wandering focus and disordered mode of vision create a productive vantage point for seeing and sensing a world that is unimaginable for the normative, focused lens that structures views projected by journalism, humanitarian appeals, political mobilization, and surveillance technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last couple of decades, queer theory has stimulated researchers in different disciplines to fundamentally question central concepts around identity, body, gender, sexuality, and belonging. Scholarship on diasporic media, however, has been slow to engage with queer theory's contributions; much research still works with definitions of diaspora based upon simple notions such as 'ethnic belonging' and fails to interrogate the hetero- and cisnormativities that structure phenomena such as mediascapes, border regimes, and migration discourses. After discussing some of the theoretical and methodological interventions that queer theory can bring to digital diaspora research, this article presents a case study to exemplify how queer theoretical discussions can be implemented in research. Madi Ancestors was initially planned as a festival in a theater building in Berlin to remember and celebrate Turkey's queer idols, but was then forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to migrate from a physical space to a digital platform. My explorative analysis of this process demonstrates how media practices bring forth a sense of queer diasporic belonging both locally and transnationally. Drawing on rich data gathered through digital ethnography, intimate insider research, interviews, and ethno-mimesis, I show how queer theoretical examination of digital diaspora can detail new forms of belonging, intergenerational kinship, and the fragmentation of diasporic spaces through digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking back to remember the "arrival" of AIDS in Turkey, this article explores how the spread of the new disease fueled border panic in Turkey from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. Drawing on a rich array of material from the archives of national newspapers and magazines, this article analyzes the media discourse on migrant sex workers from the former USSR and the first HIV-positive men. It shows how both groups were seen as intruders bringing the virus from outside Turkey's borders to its territory. In both cases, I argue, fear of the spread of the virus across borders became entangled with anxieties about the movement of ideas, images, lifeworlds, and meanings relating to sexuality that were discursively constructed as fundamentally alien to Turkish ones. The movement of sexually and racially "other" bodies across borders was seen as a threat to the fragile construed border between "Turkishness" and "foreignness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]