Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices.
Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments – be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the digital’.
The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.

Koen Leurs is Associate Professor of Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme of the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Leurs was the principal investigator of the Team Science project Co-Designing a Fair Digital Asylum System, funded by the Universities of the Netherlands Digital Society program and COMMIT, a public-private ICT research community (2022–2023). He chairs the Utrecht University-wide Digital Migration Special Interest Group, part of the Governing the Digital Society focus area. He previously co-edited The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020) and the special issues (Im)mobile Entanglements (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023) and Inclusive Media Education for Diverse Societies (Media & Communication, 2022). His latest book is Digital Migration (Sage, 2023). For more information, see https://www.uu.nl/staff/KHALeurs.
Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Netherlands. She has published widely in the fields of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and postcolonial cinema with a particular focus on postcolonial Europe from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is currently PI of the NWO Project VREM “Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament”. Among her publications are: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny, 2004), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014) and Gender, Globalisation and Violence (Routledge, 2014). She has co-edited among other Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012), Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) and Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2023). More info: https://www.uu.nl/staff/SPonzanesi

Prelims
Introduction
Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi - Doing digital migration studies: Introduction
Section I Creative practices
Karina Horsti - Section I introduction: Creative practices
Chapter 1- Nadica Deni. - Against and beyond mimeticism: A cinematic ethics of migration journeys in documentary auto-ethnography
Chapter 2 - Irene Gutiérrez - Torres Archival participatory filmmaking in migration and border studies
Chapter 3 - Rosa Wevers - Embodying data, shifting perspective: A conversation with Ahnjili Zhuparris on Future Wake
Section II Digital diasporas and placemaking
Mihaela Nedelcu - Section II introduction: Digital diasporas and placemaking
Chapter 4 - Catriona Stevens, Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding - Friendship, connection and loss: Everyday digital kinning and digital homing among Chinese transnational grandparents in Perth, Australia
Chapter 5 - Fungai Rufaro Machirori - An exploration of African digital cosmopolitanism
Chapter 6 - Marie Godin and Bahati Ghislain - YouTube became the place where ‘I could breathe’ and start ‘to sell my mouth’: Congolese refugee YouTubers in Nairobi, Kenya
Section III Affect and belonging
Athina Karatzogianni - Section III introduction: Affect and belonging
Chapter 7 - Elisabetta Costa - Digital communication, transnational relationships, and the making of place among highly skilled migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic
Chapter 8 - Nishant Shah - When immovable bodies meet unstoppable media circulation: The aporetic body in digital migration studies
Chapter 9 - Yener Bayramo.lu - Queer digital migration research: Two case studies
Section IV Visuality and digital media
Giorgia Aiello - Section IV introduction: Visuality and digital media
Chapter 10 - Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, Amanda Alencar and Yan Asadchy - Migrant agency and platformed belongings: The case of TikTok
Chapter 11 - Estrella Sendra - Affective performances of rooted cosmopolitanism through Facebook during the Festival International de Folklore et de Percussion in Louga, Senegal
Chapter 12 - Moe Suzuki - Situating the body in digital migration research: Embodied methodologies for analysing virtual reality films on displacement
Section V Datafication, infrastructuring, and Securitization
Saskia Witteborn - Section V introduction: Datafication, infrastructuring, and securitization
Chapter 13 - Daniel Leix Palumbo - The weaponization of datafied sound: The case of voice biometrics in German asylum procedures
Chapter 14 - Lud.k Stavinoha - McKinsey consultants and technocratic fantasies: Crafting the illusion of orderly migration management in Greece
Chapter 15 - Kaarina Nikunen and Sanna Valtonen - Undocumented and datafied: Anticipation, borders and the everyday life
Conclusion - Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi - Conclusions: On doing digital migration studies
Index