Digital placemaking as survival tactics: Sub-Saharan migrants’ videos at the Moroccan–Spanish border

Abstract

This article examines the use of digital media by irregular migrants in their preparation to cross the Moroccan–Spanish border. Based on long-term exploratory research that includes active participation and in-depth interviews, we analyse the videos produced by sub-Saharan young males while they live in the settlements near Ceuta. By focusing on processes of self-representation and border crossing, we highlight the role of digital media as it embodies a liminal physical experience against the violence applied by the Moroccan border security forces and the surveillance systems implemented by the Spanish Guardia Civil. Departing from recent contributions to digital migration studies, this article develops the concept of digital placemaking as an assemblage of discourses and spatial practices that serve opposite interests and generate an extremely violent confrontation through the use and control of borderspace. Therefore, we claim that the migrants’ placemaking strategies can be understood as mobile counter-discourses against border control. In this sense, the physical and digital activities of the migrants in the settlements are examples of what we call tactical placemaking, insofar as they become ways to stay alive and link their persons and futures to discussions about access to place and its consequences. To examine the migrants’ spatial tactics and their social meaning, first we will offer a brief infrastructural and historiographical account of the Moroccan–Spanish border in Ceuta. Second, we will explain our methodological perspective to shed light on the modes that placemaking experiences are created and circulated among migrants during and after their stay at the settlements. Finally, we will study the self-recordings shot in the clandestine camps of the forest in Fnideq and the border of Ceuta and consider how these videos materialize legal, cultural and physical imaginaries on migration while they simultaneously disrupt official attempts at controlling placemaking.

Digital placemaking, health & wellbeing and nature-based solutions: A systematic review and practice model

“…Some authors present digital placemaking as a subcategory of creative placemaking (Basaraba, 2021;Paquin, 2019;Stokes et al, 2018), understanding it is the application of media to creative placemakingdefined by Markusen and Gadwa (2014) as the use of arts, creative and cultural thinking to improve the interest of a place. However, most authors identify digital placemaking as an independent category that could be defined as the implementation of technology in these practices that enables communities to interact with hybrid digital-physical places (Foth, 2017b;Fredericks et al, 2018;Halegoua and Polson, 2021;Labayen and Gutierrez, 2021;Pavlovskaya, 2016;Toland et al, 2020;Wang, 2019).…”

Digital borders in spatial-temporal mobility: Social inclusion and exclusion of Chinese migrant students in Macao

“…On the other hand, mobile media creates new forms of spatial mobility-virtual mobility (Chang & Gomes, 2020) and digital "space of flow" (Castells, 1999) -that shift migrants' spatial-temporal mobility ahead of their territorial border-crossings. For instance, Labayen and Gutierrez (2021) emphasized the importance of smartphone use before and during sub-Saharan migrants' border-crossing journeys, including its ability to exchange spatial and warning information on mobile social media platforms (e.g., WhatsApp). Such mobile social media apps enable people "to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, making the global local and the local global" (Chadha & Harlow, 2015, p. 681), and thereby allow the possibility of heterogeneous virtual mobility before migrants reach the territorial border.…”

“…Mobile social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are accessed through mobile devices and connect migrants with other people to share messages, photos, and information that accelerate interactivity and broaden potential audiences (Humphreys, 2013; Wei et al, 2018). While traditional border studies emphasize digital technologies reinforcing border control and causing social exclusion for migrants (Chouliaraki & Georgiou, 2019), an increasing number of studies have begun to concern the affordance of mobile social media available to migrants to carry, seek locality information, and cross territorial borders (Järv et al, 2022; Labayen & Gutierrez, 2021). This newly emerged use of smartphones as a technology of migration greatly differentiates itself from past studies of mobile phones as feature phones without the global positioning system (GPS) and sophisticated Internet capabilities (Georgiou & Leurs, 2022).…”

Immigrant Influencers on TikTok: Diverse Microcelebrity Profiles and Algorithmic (In)Visibility

“…The role of social media in identity formation and online persona presentation through its archiving and placemaking possibilities has been solidified in media and migration literature. Thus, the possibilities of social media to collect migratory experiences and their implications for identities and belongings in different immigration stages are reflected in studies related to the narration of life stories, from migratory journeys (Labayen & Gutierrez, 2021) to the practices of self-representation as devices to establish deservingness (Nikunen, 2019). Moreover, others have focused on the affinity and affective connection facilitated by social media (Marino, 2015;Marlowe et al, 2017) and the aspirations and achievements enabled by mobile social media (Witteborn, 2015(Witteborn, , 2019.…”