Telecommunications across borders

Abstract

This article reports on recent research examining refugees as a particular user group of communication technologies. The term 'refugee' refers to all people who are exposed to refugee-type experiences and may include displaced people, asylum seekers and resettled refugees who have been granted residency in Australia. A review of literature has found that refugees as technology users have had very little attention across different disciplines, although the research has shown that technology is key to sustaining emotional wellbeing and precarious connections with family members when displaced. In particular, the telephone is the most critical technology for refugees in terms availability and familiarity. However, the access and affordability of telecommunications services and other technologies during displacement impacts on refugees' adoption and use of technology in the settlement process.

“Life would have been harder, harder and more in chaos, if there wasn’t internet”: Digital Inclusion among Newly Arrived Refugees in Australia during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…While digital inclusion of refugees and migrants has been claimed to be an under-researched area in the past (Leung, 2010;Borkert, Cingolani & Premazzi, 2009;Goodall et al, 2010;Kenny, 2016), it has since received considerable academic and political attention, most notably in Europe (Stiller et al, 2018;Merisalo & Jauhiainen, 2020;Leurs, 2016;Andrade & Doolin, 2016;Abujarour & Krasnova 2017Martzoukou & Burnett, 2018;Colucci et al, 2018;Abujarour, 2018;Abujarour, Krasnova & Hoffmeier, 2018;Abujarour et al, 2019;Beretta et al, 2018) but also in Australia (Khoir, Du & Koronois, 2014;Alam & Imram, 2015;Richards, 2015;Lloyd, 2016;Lloyd et al, 2013Lloyd et al, , 2016Almohamed et al 2017, Shariati, 2019Almohamed & Vyas, 2019;Leung, 2018), New Zealand (Andrade & Doolin, 2016) and the United States (Bletscher 2020). The increased focus on this topic is linked to the 'global humanitarian crisis ' (Schultz et al 2020) which has led to, and continues to generate today, an unprecedented number of displaced people undertaking perilous journeys to seek protection.…”