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This article analyses the communication activities of Filmstichting West Indië, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced 12 documentary propaganda films about Dutch colonial Suriname, and the resistance against these reductive representations in zines of the Surinamese migrant organization Vereniging Ons Suriname. We draw on hence unstudied archival material to dissect the role of media operations, as persuasive, strategic media productions, in constructing and challenging differential relations between colonizers and colonial subjects, and symbolically negotiating how different territories and bodies relate to each other. A visual and textual analysis of the cases unpacks historical struggles over the regimes of (post)colonial (im)mobilities, as they are produced and articulated within regimes of representation. We ultimately argue that, in order to understand the historical constitution of mobility regimes (and, in order to be able to critique them), we need to study the co-production of mobility regimes within regimes of mediated representation.

Taking stock of media activist initiatives in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, this article discusses findings from case study research informing the media education platform “diraya.media.” Through participatory methodology, the case studies and the bilingual (Arabic/English) website aim to analyze and strengthen local media literacy pedagogies by learning with and from media activists in the region. This article reports on six case studies of SWANA-based media activist organizations and pedagogical material for the media literacy classroom. The goal is to reflect and discuss the methodological and theoretical ramifications of Diraya as a pedagogical space for reflection and knowledge exchange between media activists and other learners in the region and beyond. Drawing on the participating activists’ experiences, Diraya is embedded in the turn toward radical media education and civic media literacies, contributing to (1) de-Westernizing media literacy education, (2) creating more learning materials based on local activist knowledge as important resources to increase media literacy, and (3) enabling of long-term collaborations by archiving and making public experiences from SWANA-based media activists.

While infrastructures of media and of migration currently converge in specific ways, in this commentary, we consider how these infrastructures always reflect distinctive moments in media history, as well as in migration history. An archaeological approach to infrastructure posits that media infrastructures do not spring into action fully formed, and neither is there ever a moment when they would be fully formed. We propose the perspective of deep time of infrastructures as a way of opening up unresolved questions about what critical researchers can and should do with historically-informed inquiry of media technologies across migration contexts. We specifically operationalize the deep time of media and migration infrastructures by addressing the three dimensions of: (1) materialities; (2) practices; and (3) imaginaries.

Contemporary migration infrastructures commonly reflect imaginaries of technological solutionism. Fantasies of efficient ordering, administrating and limiting of refugee bodies in space and time through migration infrastructures are distinctive, but not novel as they draw on long historical lineages. Drawing on archival records, we present a case-study on post-World-War-II refugee encampments. By highlighting the deeply historical role of media in migration governance, i.e. the act of mediation through technological infrastructuring, we seek to bring together the fields of migration studies and media studies. We argue that this cross-fertilization helps to historically untangle power dimensions, inherent workings, as well as human experiences imbued in the tech-based management of migration ‘crises’. Uncovering historical underpinnings of digitalized asylum regimes through the prism of media infrastructures, and socio-technical imaginaries surrounding them, points at continuities and genealogies of containing and managing people in time and space, reaching into technologies of colonial and fascist projects. We thus seek to explore the assumptions that drive the build-up of migration and media infrastructures: How are migrants, camps, media and their infrastructural interrelations imagined? Which cultural horizons are reflected in technologies, which functions are imagined for whom, and how are utilitarian ideas about humanitarianism and migration control embedded?

This chapter explores mobile socialities and media practices in the context of refugee camps in post-war Germany (ca. 1945-1960). In refugee camps, forcefully mobilised individuals are forcefully immobilised, making the camp into an institution, where national-territorialist imaginaries of belonging and disbelonging are negotiated - through controlling (im)mobility and respective socialities. Based on archival material from post-war German shelters, this chapter explores these paradoxical workings of mobilisation and immobilisation in forced migration processes. To do so, media practice theory serves as an analytical prism to observe socialities enacted in and around media, which make up experiences of mobility and immobility. The material here points at three dimensions of media practices, shaping mobile socialities: socio-material immobilisation through the set-up of physical spaces, creating forced sociality as well as encapsulation and segregation; media technological environments and repertoires in camps, enabling and controlling communication and connectivity; and mobilising media and communication practices of resistance, activism and protest among camp residents. This variety of camp-based media practices provides a historical perspective on how practices around media shape a spectrum of both mobile and immobile socialities and anti-socialities. Apart from counteracting a rhetoric of newness often found in accounts of mobile media and digital communication, such historicizations of media practices in camps, ultimately, lead us to preceding articulations of socialities and anti-socialities, where mobility and immobility have been negotiated and imagined in an extreme counter-space at the margins of society, which always reflects its utopian ideas of inside and outside.

This paper provides a historical and genealogical perspective on media technologies in refugee administration, and the mediation of the asylum regime. Modern global refugee governance heavily relies on media technologies in order to facilitate modes of disciplining forced migrants in time and space. Refugee camps today run on Bitcoins, use iris scans for payment. Border control, asylum registration and decision making are highly digitized and often based on AI technologies (Leurs, 2020; Mácias, 2020). Yet, while digital technologies are sold to authorities as highly innovative and brand new, practices of media-based refugee governance have historical roots and trajectories. Tracing some of these roots in the context of German refugee governance after 1945 up until today, this paper argues for a historicizing perspective to critically understand the role of media technologies in building asylum regimes, foregrounding the experiences of individuals subjected to these technological infrastructures. Technologies, such as paper slips or card indexes in the 1940s and 1950s, or digital chip cards emerging in the 1990s are predecessors to digital refugee governance, laying the groundwork for practices of control, disciplining, ranking and rating, as continued today. This paper thinks together and explores historical and contemporary incidents of media technologies imbued in the creation of refugee governance. Carving out various examples of how refugee administration and asylum regimes were and are built in and through media technologies and practices, the paper draws on an infrastructuralist (Peters, 2015; Parks & Starosielski, 2015) take on media technologies. Examples, such as paper-based registries, refugee passports, chip cards, or iris scans are the basis for a discussion of media technologies’ “leverage” (Peters, 2015, p.18) as socio-material artifacts for subjugating and managing refugee individuals in time and space. Historically, this process finds expression

Migration not only entangles people, cultures and societies but also histories and memories of diverse groups across national and cultural boundaries. The article focuses on mediated memory cultures of migration both theoretically and empirically. The first part discusses how cultural memories of migration in cross-medial flows of remediation can entangle ‘mnemonic imaginations’ of diverse groups within societies across time, cultures and media. In response to the conceptual framework of ‘entangled media histories’ this theoretical part explores entangledmedia histories of migration from the angle of memory studies. The second part of the article gives selected case studies. They reveal how media have historically mediated migratory memories and how they make use of this media history in contemporary productions. The examples are two Swedish documentary films of 2011 and 2015 and two German television documentaries of 2015 and 2016. With this theoretical and empirical approach the article shows how media actively contribute to debates about contemporary migration movements by the help of time-travelling migratory memory and media history.

The way a society remembers its past is crucial for how it deals with its present. Migration is one of these historically continuous events that produce memory cultures, which affect how refugees and migrants are perceived today. This thesis presents a case study of mediated memory cultures of migration in Germany. Mediations of migration history from two strikingly similar periods of condensed societal communication about migration, the so-called “refugee crisis” (2015-2017) and “asylum crisis” (1991-1994), are analyzed. The aim is to understand how memory cultures of historical migrations both are part of and affect contemporary mediations of migration. Embedded in a conceptual triangle of media, memory and migration studies, this research goes beyond a study of migrant representations. It argues that memory cultures can demonstrate how media repetitively and continuously re-narrativize migration – across different cases of migration, across the media ensemble and across two time periods. Media pre- and remediate the story of migration in cultural templates and, thereby, contribute to the social construction of how migration is understood in society. A narrative and discourse analysis of mainstream media texts, which feature historical migrations into and from Germany, sheds light on how historical frameworks of telling the story of migration form a media culture of migration. It can show that mediations of migration are historically continuous and repetitive: Media converge diverse experiences of flight, expulsion and migration over history into similar narrative patterns and cultural schematic templates of mediation. The analysis of a wide variety of factual and fictional media texts (broadcasting, press and online) from both time periods shows how media re-tell the story of migration within certain meta-narratives, on a textual and visual level, regardless the migration case. Narratives and discourses of migration history form a contested memory culture: Mediat