While there is increasing scholarly attention given to the impact of digital technologies on forced migration, the points of view and situated experiences of refugees living in the diaspora are understudied. This article addresses Sahrawis refugee diasporas, which have close ties with the Sahrawi political cause. Resulting from the unresolved Western Sahara conflict, Sahrawi forced migrants are at the eye of one of the world’s most protracted refugee situations. While most Sahrawis live in refugee camps in Algeria, some Sahrawis have managed to travel onwards. Social media allows those living elsewhere to maintain connections with contacts living in their original refugee camp. However, Facebook has become a complex environment, particularly for Sahrawi women. Gendered mechanisms of control, such as digital transnational gossip, result in a paradoxical politics of belonging: these women simultaneously desire to keep in touch but do not want to become a subject of gossip. From narratives of Sahrawi young women based in Spain gathered through interviews between 2016 and 2018, as well as a specific Facebook campaign and fan page, the focus is on strategies Sahrawi women develop to avoid and confront digital transnational gossip.

The concept of home relates to feelings of belonging coupled with emotionally meaningful relationships. In protracted refugee situations, the concept of home is re-signified by the material and symbolic conditions of living in exile. This article focuses on the Sahrawi refugee diaspora in the Tindouf refugee camps in Algeria to examine the role of emotions in the relationship between home and digital technology practices. Based on the narratives of Sahrawi refugees who were living in the camps at the time of the research fieldwork in 2016 as well as interviews with media activists, this article details Sahrawi refugees’ transnational dynamics in consolidating their camps as a home through feelings of digital connectivity. Thereby, it analyses multiple scales of digital home-making among Sahrawi refugees while exploring the ways in which refugees have generated emotional strategies to create a sense of home through their everyday digital practices.

This article evaluates the concept of ‘emotivescapes’ as a way of addressing digitally emotional processes of belonging among conflict-generated diasporas. It examines the empirical potential of the concept based on the Sahrawi refugee diaspora in Spain and Mauritania and the connection of its members with their ‘home-camps’ in Algeria. To this end, the article explores everyday digital media practices that reveal the circulation of emotions among the Sahrawi community outside of the refugee camps at the intersection of intimate, community, and national spheres. The research focuses on the experiences of 32 women, considers Sahrawi gender roles, and argues for enriching emotional debates in the diaspora space. The findings demonstrate how female media practices in protracted situations of displacement are negotiated through emotional attachments in not only direct social interactions but also memories and imaginations that are reformulated from the intimate to the national levels.

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The theoretical development of the concept of diaspora accounts for almost any transnational population that maintains strong emotional ties based on nostalgia and memory with their territories of origin, but also affects and ties with their territories of destination. These processes are generated through intrinsically diverse experiences that are constructed in-between both social realities. The emergence of digital technologies has provided these populations with a new scenario wherein the past and present homes are connected by immediate communication, which currently reduces distances, and uprootedness. However, few investigations have analyzed the frequent communication paradoxes that occur within these communities based on not only the need to be connected but also the failure to meet family expectations. Most studies have focused on the experience of mothers and the role they play in maintaining traditions linked to their places of origin, leaving behind the experience of daughters and their mutual relationship. This article addresses this gap while exploring the challenges that these contradictions present for the Sahrawi digital diaspora in Spain. Specifically, it investigates relationships between mothers and daughters and their impact on the social media practices of the latter. Through a social media ethnography that was developed between 2016 and 2018 together with Sahrawi refugees in Spain, this research examines how aspects such as the maintenance of family honor and the need to build one’s own life plan constantly clash in relationships between mothers and daughters with respect to cultural preservation, the emergence of new forms of belonging, emotional relations, and community expectations.