Upon arrival to Europe, young migrants are found grappling with new language demands, cultural expectations, values, and beliefs that may differ from global youth culture and their country of origin. This process of coming-of-age while on-the-move is increasingly digitally mediated. Young migrants are “connected migrants”, using smart phones and social media to maintain bonding ties with their home country while establishing new bridging relationships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality which alerts us socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, gender and sexuality impact upon identification and subordination, we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all gay young adult migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between desired migrants – such as elite expatriates and heterosexuals – and those living on the margins of Europe – forced migrants and lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) migrants. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews conducted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with gay young adult forced and voluntary migrants, this paper aims to understand how sexual identification in tandem with bonding and bridging social capital diverge and converge between the two groups all while considering the interplay between their online and offline entanglements of their worlds.
Personal and intimate consequences of cultural globalization have received little critical attention in comparison to scholarship on politics, finance, or the environment. Taking digital technology practices of young adult expatriates as an entry point to understand the emotional and affective consequences of transnational mobility, in this article we research the interrelated cultural politics of emotion, migration, and digitization of middle-class mobilities. Presenting a case study of digital experiences of young adult expatriates (aged fifteen to twenty-five years) living in the Netherlands, we seek to better understand how emotions and affects of middle-class transnational mobility are mediated through digital technologies. Our empirical argument draws from thirty-one semistructured, face-to-face in-depth interviews with young adult expatriates and smartphone photo-elicitation exercises. We develop the notion of transnational digital intimacy practices to address how transnational mobile subjects negotiate emotional precarity through selective smartphone and social media practices. Finally, we call into question the notion of “expatriates” as supposed elite mobiles with global privilege. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.
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