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Serving as the introduction to the special issue on ‘Migrant narratives’, this article proposes a multi-perspectival and multi-stakeholder analysis of how migration is narrated in the media in the last decade. This research agenda is developed by focussing on groups of actors that are commonly studied in isolation from each other: (1) migrants, (2) media professionals such as journalists and spokespersons from humanitarian organizations, (3) governments and corporations and (4) artists and activists. We take a relational approach to recognize how media power is articulated alongside a spectrum of more top-down and more bottom-up perspectives, through specific formats, genres and styles within and against larger frameworks of governmentality. Taken together, the poetics and politics of migrant narratives demand attention respectively for how stakeholders variously aesthetically present and politically represent migration. The opportunities, challenges, problems and commitments observed among the four groups of actors also provide the means to rethink our practice and responsibilities as media and migration scholars contributing to decentring media technologies and re-humanizing migrants.

Journalistiek, ‘Fake News’ & Desinformatie: Handboek voor Journalistiek Onderwijs is de Nederlandse vertaling van het in 2018 verschenen Journalism, ‘Fake News’ & Disinformation: Handbook for Journalism Education & Training. Wij, Berit Zandbelt en Koen Leurs, werkten van april tot juli 2020 aan deze vertaling in onze capaciteit als student-stagiair en universitair docent verbonden aan de Universiteit Utrecht. Dit was een turbulente periode met ingrijpende gebeurtenissen. De Covid-19 virus pandemie die wereldwijd het publieke leven tot stilstand bracht bleek volgens Peter Burger, universitair docent journalistiek (Universiteit Leiden), “de ideale voedingsbodem voor10 de verspreiding van hoaxen, broodje-aapverhalen en samenzweringstheorieën” .Misinformatie en desinformatie met betrekking tot corona betrof onder andere anti- vaxxers die schadelijke foutieve berichtgeving over vaccins verspreidden, Bill Gates die besmette mensen met microchips wilde implanteren, verbanden die worden gelegd tussen 5g-netwerken en het corona virus, onjuiste berichten over de symptomenen behandeling van het virus en misleidende berichten over de positieve effecten van de lockdown op ons dierenrijk, met gefabriceerde beelden van dolfijnen die weer in de grachten van Venetië zouden zwemmen en herten die Parijse kerken zouden hebben bezocht. Om de consequenties van de informatiewanorde die ook in Nederland ontstond rondom ‘Corona’ te duiden, hebben wij Yvonne Zonderop en José van Dijck gevraagd een voorwoord te schrijven bij deze Nederlandstalige versie. Zonderop, onafhankelijk journalist en lid van de UNESCO Commissie Nederland, pleit ervoor om jonge en aankomende journalisten het tot “hún romantische opdracht” te maken in de “tegenaanval” te gaan tegen mis-, des- en malinformatie. Van Dijck, universiteitshoogleraar media en digitale samenleving aan de Universiteit Utrecht reflecteert aan de hand van de Covid-19 “infodemie” over het belang van kwaliteitsjournalistiek als hoeder van democratie.

This entry explores intersectional data-analysis rooted in social justice in the social sciences and humanities. The datalogical turn foregrounds the proliferation of algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge in the digital datafication of everyday life. Big data, digital methods and data studies are buzzwords that privilege modes of knowledge production to elevate quantitative, abstracted and disembodied approaches over qualitative data approaches. However, database technologies and human experiences are always necessarily mutually constituted (Metcalf & Crawford, 2016). Infrastructures, categorizations and algorithmic processing are commonly black-boxed and therefore invisible with the consequence that data generated is never raw, but always cooked (Bowker 2006). These processes are not devoid of different forms of cultural prejudices and discriminations, rather they are often used to exacerbate gendered, sexed, racialized, classed power hierarchies. Sub-topics to be discussed in this entry include feminist ethics of care and alternative data studies (Leurs, 2017; Luka & Millette, 2018); examinations of digital infrastructures including e-waste (Hogan, 2015) and assemblages of hardware and software (Bivens, 2017); and critiques of data gathering and data visualizations (Haraway, 1997; Kennedy et al., 2016).

Under the heading of digital migration studies, scholars from various disciplines have started to explore the roles of smartphones in the lives of displaced migrants. Smartphones are material, portable, embodied, and affective artefacts. Leurs and Patterson, through unpacking smartphones as infrastructures, assess the various meanings, roles, and usages smartphones may play in the lives of displaced migrants. The chapter focuses on three emergent perspectives in research on smartphones in the context of displaced migration: as part of infrastructures of (1) survival and surveillance, (2) transnational communication and emotion management, and (3) digital self-representation. In describing these three themes, the authors are attentive to highlighting the dialectic of structure and agency, subordination and empowerment.

Personal and intimate consequences of cultural globalization have received little critical attention in comparison to scholarship on politics, finance, or the environment. Taking digital technology practices of young adult expatriates as an entry point to understand the emotional and affective consequences of transnational mobility, in this article we research the interrelated cultural politics of emotion, migration, and digitization of middle-class mobilities. Presenting a case study of digital experiences of young adult expatriates (aged fifteen to twenty-five years) living in the Netherlands, we seek to better understand how emotions and affects of middle-class transnational mobility are mediated through digital technologies. Our empirical argument draws from thirty-one semistructured, face-to-face in-depth interviews with young adult expatriates and smartphone photo-elicitation exercises. We develop the notion of transnational digital intimacy practices to address how transnational mobile subjects negotiate emotional precarity through selective smartphone and social media practices. Finally, we call into question the notion of “expatriates” as supposed elite mobiles with global privilege. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

This introduction contextualizes thirteen papers included in the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special collection examining the interrelationships between media, migration, and nationalism. This collaborative project was initiated during the Media, Migration and the Rise of Nationalism seminar held in Tokyo in 2018. The seminar was organized around the themes of cosmopolitanism, migration control, transnationalism, and contact zones. This selection covers and brings together long-standing and unresolved debates, which will allow media and migration researchers to engage in a multiperspectival reconsideration of how politics, mobility, and mediation intersect and co-shape each other. In this article, we first position ourselves in relevant debates by charting implications and shared characteristics underlying the recent economic crisis, climate crisis, refugee crisis, and COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 of the article focuses on cosmopolitanism. This thorny scholarly debate is captured by the artist Takashi Tanihata in the works A Letter That Isn’t Read I and II. As we discuss, the artworks depict an endless loop of (mis)communicating goats, which represent the possibilities and implications of mediated solidarity and polarization. The special collection features three articles that further nuance the heated debates on the politics of representation and mediation in relation to cosmopolitanism. Section 2 of this article is thematized with a painting by the artist XX titled The Scents on the Borders, which depicts perfume bottles and their scents encountering each other. The work, as we argue, refers to the complex, evolving relationships between border-crossing subjects and technologies of migration management and control. A latest development shows how tech-driven surveillance experiments tap into sensing technologies including those related to the sense of smell to secure borders. The section consists of four articles that demonstrate how the politics of material and symbolic bordering proliferates outside and inside nation-state boundaries. Section 3 takes inspiration from an artwork titled The Vision (Reportage), by Motoi Hirata, which features a violet sea snail as a motif to represent migrants and diaspora groups in terms of transnational connectivity. The section includes three articles that analyze the workings and lived experiences of connectivity and transnationalism across nation-state borders. In section 4 of this article, we take cues from Satsuki Hinokimoto’s abstract painting The Spread and link its deployment of isolated and interacting colored concentric circles to the evocative scholarly concept of the cultural contact zone. This section of the issue consists of three articles that focus on migrant encounters with difference and the politics of integration in various urban settings across the world. Finally, in our conclusion, we advocate for media and migration researchers to take up the critical concept of intersectionality to better acknowledge the internal heterogeneity of migrant communities alongside the similarities and differences among migrant communities in tandem with various interacting axes of agential identification and structural forms of oppression.

Young migrants – particularly refugees – are commonly the object of stereotypical visual media representations and often have no choice but to position themselves in response to them. This article explores whether making young migrants aware of the politics of representation through media literacy education contributes to strengthening their participation and resilience. We reflect on a media literacy program developed with teachers and 100 students at a Dutch “International Transition Classes” school. The educational program focuses on visual media production using smartphones, raising critical consciousness and promoting civic engagement. Ethnographic data analyzed include field notes, a focus group with teachers, in-depth and informal interviews, student-produced footage, and a 10-minute ethnographic film. In our increasingly polarized mediatized world, better recognition of how the needs of certain young people diverge depending on how they are situated in racialized, gendered, and classed structures of power is needed to work towards inclusive media literacy education.

For the last 10 years, Information, Communication & Society has published a special issue including some highlights from the annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This, the 11th special issue, continues in the tradition of sharing rigorous, interdisciplinary, critical research from the event. #AoIR2017 was themed on ‘Networked Publics’ and took place from 18 to 21 October in Estonia in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. The conference was hosted by the programme chair Andra Siibak, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tartu, and facilitated by the Institute of Social Studies and the Centre for the Information Society. Held at the Dorpat Convention Center in pic- turesque downtown Tartu, the conference drew together attendees from a broad range of national, disciplinary, and methodological backgrounds, and we present here a selection of papers reflecting this broadness and diversity of internet research.we propose a focus on networked (in)justice drawing attention to:. How mainstream scholarly conceptualizations of publics and platforms prioritize some networked publics and marginalize others. How networked publics are shaped as an assemblage of hardware, design, algorithms, discourse, bodies, collectives, and affect. How networked publics reflect and shape intersecting power relations of geography, gender, sexuality, race, and sexuality, among others. How networked publics are distinctively local, but simultaneously shaped by transnational and global dynamics.

In this chapter, I chart the explanatory power of the concept of migration infrastructures. My focus is specifically on what can be called ‘migration crisis infrastructures’: contemporary tech-driven interventions developed to disrupt forced-migration crisis situations across the world, and I draw attention to the historical lineages of these interventions.

Upon arrival to Europe, young adult gay migrants are found grappling with sexual norms, language demands, cultural ex- pectations, values and beliefs that may differ from their country of origin. Parallel processes of coming-out, coming-of-age and migration are increasingly digitally mediated. Young adult gay migrants are “connected migrants”, using smartphones and social media to maintain bonding ties with contacts in their home country while establishing new bridging relation- ships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality, socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, and gender and sexuality have an impact upon iden- tification and subordination, thus we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all young adult gay migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between those living on the margins of Europe—forced migrants including non-normative racialized young gay men—and voluntary migrants—such as elite expatriates including wealthy, white and Western young gay men. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews conducted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with young adult gay forced and voluntary migrants, this article aims to understand how sexual identification in tandem with bonding and bridging social capital diverge and converge between the two groups all while considering the interplay between the online and offline entanglements of their worlds.

This chapter proposes a critical intervention in digital diaspora studies by foregrounding a relational approach that is inspired by feminist and postcolonial theory. This innovative framework allows us to grasp contemporary human mobility as shaped by and constitutive of an unevenly interconnected world. Relational implies taking into account different perspectives and methodologies on diaspora studies which defy ossified notions of ‘here’ and ‘there’, and of ethnic absolutism but sees diaspora as a continuum that needs to be critically scrutinized in its different manifestations. This holds also for the notion of digital diaspora. Recent buzzwords including ‘the connected migrant’, ‘digital diaspora’, ‘online diaspora’ and ‘e-diasporas’ commonly champion agency, particularly of non-white communities hailing from the Global South. This perspective risks glossing over the ways in which everyday offline and online contexts are steeped in intersecting gendered, racial, classed, generational and geo-political power relations. We provide a genealogy of digital diasporas scholarship in order to counter this lack of critical attention for power differences and material, social and emotional contexts. We will do so by combining media and non-media centric paradigm shifts in internet studies with the several turns and takes in critical digital diaspora studies.

Digital migration scholarship has foregrounded how migrants (refugees, forced migrants, expatriates among others) use smartphones and social media to technologically mediate co-presence with loved ones and friends abroad. Aural, visual and haptic affordances give shape to feelings of co-presence, triggering various affects. Affectivity refers here to bodily sensations like joy which can be circulated among migrant families and friendship groups, through digital networks. Paradoxically, maintaining bonds as well as keeping face can be felt as emotionally taxing, triggering negative affective intensities such as fear, anxiety, shame and guilt. Still, the young refugees I have interviewed feel strongly compelled to transnationally connect because they strongly care. Therefore, this research note proposes the notion of digital care labour to attend to the emotional, digital labour involved in maintaining transnational connections between people living at distance, in starkly diverging material conditions.

Focusing on two groups of community media makers in the Netherlands, this chapter considers community media as power loci in fostering citizenship and belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we explore how local public broadcasters and feminist podcast makers may engage in the “mediation of difference” (Siapera, 2010) across intersecting axes of difference including gender, race, nationality and generation. We do so by asking how cultural diversity is constructed in the circulation of meaning, and how it co-shapes inclusion and exclusion mechanisms for their audiences. Taking cues from Jesús Martín-Barbero (2006) we study how our informants imagine counterpublics and belongingness by focusing on institutionality, technicity, rituality and sociality. We emphasize how local public broadcasters and feminist podcast makers in particular, mediate citizenship on a community level by representing difference.

This Special Collection “Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe” historicizes, contextualizes, empirically grounds, and conceptually reflects on the impact of digital technologies on forced migration. In this introductory essay, we elaborate digital migration as a developing field of research. Taking the exceptional attention for digital mediation within the recent so-called “European refugee crisis” as a starting point, we reflect on the main conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges for this emerging field and how it is taking shape through interdisciplinary dialogues and in interaction with policy and public debate. Our discussion is organized around five central questions: (1) Why Europe? (2) Where are the field and focus of digital migration studies? (3) Where is the human in digital migration? (4) Where is the political in digital migration? and (5) How can we de-center Europe in digital migration studies? Alongside establishing common ground between various communities of scholarship, we plea for non-digital-media-centric-ness and foreground a commitment toward social change, equity and social justice.

This chapter offers reflection on doing digital migration studies. Digital migration studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field focussed on studying migration in, through and by means of the internet. As the so-called European refugee crisis demonstrates, the scale, intensities and types of transnational migration and digital networking have drastically changed in recent years. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have fundamentally transformed migration processes and vice versa. Top-down management of migration flows and border control is increasingly dependent on digital technologies and datafication, while from the bottom-up migrants use smart phones and apps to access information, maintain transnational relations, establish local connections and send remittances. In the first half of the chapter, drawing on (Candidatu et al., 2018) we distinguish between three paradigms of digital migration studies: (1) migrants in cyberspace; (2) everyday digital migrant life; (3) migrants as data. In the second half of the chapter, we offer the methodological research principles of relationality, adaptability and ethics-of-care to operationalize digital migration studies with a commitment to social justice. Challenging unjust power relations is important both when studying vulnerable groups as well as studying elites. The many experiences, obstacles and opportunities we found in the literature reveal that the future of digital migration studies lies at the intersection of big and small data, there is great urgency in triangulating quantified patterns with in-depth narrative accounts and situated experiences.

Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. The pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes Europe’s colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present. Of special interest is an essay by the late Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of Europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan Europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on Eurocentrism and universal values. In this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting Europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies.

Young connected migrants challenge exclusionary European understandings of white, secular, middle-class European family life. A better understanding of how migrants digitally ‘do family’ across borders and simultaneously use digital media to establish new local connections is urgently needed. Contributing to the emerging research field of digital migration studies, this chapter shows how young migrants digitally articulate their presence in Europe on their own terms vis-à-vis resurgent discourses about the failure of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiments, and Islamophobia. Moroccan-Dutch youth in the Netherlands, young Somalis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and young Londoners of various ethnic backgrounds show they digitally stake out their positionalities vis-à-vis these discourses, both by turning towards members of their own communities living overseas (“encapsulation”) as well as by engaging in intercultural dialogue across cultural differences (“cosmopolitanization) (Christensen & Jansson, 2014).

Marking a decade of exciting interdisciplinary internet research, this is the 10th Information, Communication and Society special issue that features research generated by the annual Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conferences. This issue consists of eight provocative articles selected from #AoIR2016, the 17th annual conference, held at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany from 5–8 October 2016. The #AoIR2016 conference theme Internet Rules! invited participants to address the complex interplay of digital technologies, business models and user practices. For some, the Internet rules! Others are ruled by the internet. Reflecting the emergent focus during the conference, this special issue addresses the Internet as a set of connected platforms that have various technical, social, cultural, political and figurative meanings, and seeks to understand rules as a set of normative values. Offering a primer on platform values, the contributions share a commitment to social justice, offer innovative theoretical interventions and empirically ground the workings of platform values from various scholarly perspectives. They show how normative digitally networked technologies are mutually shaped by top-down decisions such as the profit-oriented workings of algorithms that differentially value some users over others and bottom-up user practices that both sustain and subvert value-laden mechanisms.Platform values: an introduction to the #AoIR16 special issue

What may responsible data-analysis in the social sciences and humanities look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race-, and geography-blind 'big data' ideologies I call for ethical, anti-oppressive digital data-driven research in the social sciences and humanities I argue that a more ethical, situated and reflexive data scholarship may emerge from the re-integration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is no panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a roadmap for an alternative data-analysis practice, which is more situated, reflexive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and context-aware perspective, that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations and scrutinizes benefits and harm an 'asymmetrically reciprocal' (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with 84 young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework is productive to recognise digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavour. Data driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity, and the autonomy of research participants over their own data.

Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital performativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.

This chapter revolves around three heroes Midia, Sarah and Xavier. The chapter seeks to offer suggestions for how to engage in critical feminist and postcolonial digital humanities scholarship. In championing data-mining of unprecedented large-scale databases of Facebook and Twitter user-generated content and digitized archives, digital humanities scholars have initially uncritically jumped on the Big Data bandwagon. Inspired by Midia's hyperlinking practices, the chapter addresses the forging of links between people, texts and technologies as theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges that have particular implications for feminist and postcolonial digital humanities. This is consistent with the goal of feminist and postcolonial digital humanities, which seeks to research, critique and improve local, national, transnational and global forms of exploitation, exclusion, agency, ambiguity and hybridity in relation to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class.

Popular accounts of datafied ways of knowing implied in the ascendance of big data posit that the increasingly massive volume of information collected immanently to digital technologies affords new means of understanding complex social processes. The development of novel insights is attributed precisely to big data’s unprecedented scale, a scale that enables what Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier note is a shift away from causal inferences to modes of analysis based rather on ‘the benef its of correlation’ (2013: 18). Indicating the vast implications of this shift, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s influential framing of big data describes a revolutionary change in the ways ‘we live, work and think’, as phrased by the book’s subtitle. But the ‘we’ in this proclamation tends to go unspecif ied. Who exactly benef its from a shift toward correlative data analysis techniques in an age of big data? And by corollary, who suffers?

‘On Digital Crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond the national and mono-ethnic focus. We argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances, opting for a comparative and postcolonial framework that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. Internet applications make it possible to sustain new forms of diaspora and networks, which operate within and beyond Europe, making issues of ethnicity, nationality, race and class not obsolete but transformed. It is therefore important and timely to analyse how these reconfigurations take place and affect everyday life. Using a critical approach to digital tools that avoids utopian notions of connectivity and borderlessness, this article highlights the dyssimmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity. It further introduces the different contributions to the special issue making connections and tracing relations among themes and methods as well as sketching main patterns for further research. It also offers a panorama of other related studies and projects in the field, 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, which we gather under the heading of postcolonial digital humanities.