Social Media and Forced Migration: The Subversion and Subjugation of Political Life

Abstract

As social media platforms and the associated communication technologies become increasingly available, affordable and usable, these tools effectively enable forced migrants to negotiate political life across borders. This connection provides a basis for resettled refugees to interact with their transnational networks and engage in political activities in novel ways. This article presents a digital ethnography with 15 resettled refugees living in New Zealand and the role of social media and transnational networks for the maintenance and creation of political lives. Taking a broad interpretation of how political and political life are understood, this article focuses on how power is achieved and leveraged to provide legitimacy and control. In particular, it examines how refugees practise transnational politics through social media as they navigate both the subjugation and subversion of power. These digital interactions have the potential to reconfigure and, at times collapse, the distance between the resettled “here” and the transnational “there”. This article highlights how social media facilitates political lives as an ongoing transnational phenomenon and its implications for the country of resettlement and the wider diaspora.

Mobile communication and refugees: An analytical review of academic literature

“…Researchers deliberately situate refugees' mobile phone practices in relation to power structures of governments in both home and host countries. The study of Marlowe (2019) with different refugee populations in New Zealand showed that refugees' tactical uses of social networks accessed through their phones enabled them to communicate locally and transnationally, while subversively challenging power structures and avoiding censorship from governments in their countries of origin. Leurs' (2017) research with young Syrian refugees in the Netherlands provides important implications for rethinking the affordances of smartphones when it comes to the support of refugees' fundamental rights (e.g., the right to information and expression).…”

Mobile-mediated mothering from a distance: A case study of Somali mothers in Port Elizabeth, South Africa

“…Second, O’Reilly’s (2013: 186) call for a ‘mother-centred’ focus is central to the aim of interrogating the common perception of mothers as ‘passive’ in the literature of migration and motherhood. Third, it broadly contributes to the literature on transnational families, transnational motherhood and mothering at a distance in the context of the African continent (Cogo, 2017; Marlowe, 2013). It is especially relevant considering how most literature on Somali migration focuses either on a gender-neutral refugee position, or its impact in European context.…”

The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology

“…Using the community structure of the Twitter mobility network, they are able to recreate mobility patterns by region. A recent article by Marlowe (2019) presents a digital ethnography of refugees settled in New Zealand. The goal is to examine transnational practices of social media and its influence on integration.…”