Social media and (im)mobility: implications for community development.

The contemporary forced migration contexts of conflict, climate change and contagion present new challenges and opportunities for the ways in which community development is understood, practised and imagined. The accelerating trends of refugee persecution and high-impact weather events causing disasters now sit alongside the uncertainties of closed borders and rapidly evolving geopolitics. Despite these dislocations and constraints on human mobility and immobility, the possibilities for connection remain, although unevenly. Mediated predominantly through the smartphone, social media offers new opportunities, cautions and ethical considerations for the circulation of care, intimacy and trust. These flows can now significantly inform and shape everyday lives, political action and how 'community' is envisaged and enacted. In the ongoing context of dislocation and separation, this paper presents a longitudinal digital ethnography that examines how people from refugee backgrounds practise transnational connection and community when physical reunion is not possible. These online spaces represent opportunities to explore the implications for community development and more broadly social work education. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of the social organization of difference and its associated domains of encounters, configurations and representations, this paper articulates the possibilities and challenges for community development and more broadly social work education and practice when opportunities for physical co-presence are highly constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]