This Special Collection "Forced migration and digital connectivity in(to) Europe" historicizes, contextualizes, empirically grounds, and conceptually reflects on the impact of digital technologies on forced migration. In this introductory essay, we elaborate digital migration as a developing field of research. Taking the exceptional attention for digital mediation within the recent so-called "European refugee crisis" as a starting point, we reflect on the main conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges for this emerging field and how it is taking shape through interdisciplinary dialogues and in interaction with policy and public debate. Our discussion is organized around five central questions: (1) Why Europe? (2) Where are the field and focus of digital migration studies? (3) Where is the human in digital migration? (4) Where is the political in digital migration? and (5) How can we de-center Europe in digital migration studies? Alongside establishing common ground between various communities of scholarship, we plea for non-digital-media-centric-ness and foreground a commitment toward social change, equity and social justice.

Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital performativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.

Original citation:Leurs, Koen (2015) Digital passages: migrant youth 2.0: diaspora, gender and youth cultural intersections. MediaMatters.

This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants stranded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia feel about staying in touch with loved ones abroad using Internet-based transnational communication. Left-behind during transit migration from Somalia to overseas, at this moment they can only digitally connect with contacts living inside for example dreamed diasporic locations in Europe. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group and concept maps drawn by informants the ambivalent workings of affects spurred by transnational communication are explored. The intense feelings of togetherness originating in Skype video-chat, mobile phone calls and Facebook use are conceptualized with the notion of transnational affective capital – one of the only sources of capital the informants have. The ambivalence of transnational affective capital is scrutinized by exploring whether such connectivity routines offer trust, enable anxiety management and promote ‘ontological security’. Alternatively, the question arises whether transnational communication may further exacerbate ontological insecurity: discomfort, unsettlement and increased anxiety related to the precarious situation of being stranded.

What could a social-justice oriented, feminist data studies look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race-and geography-blind 'big data' ideologies, I call for ethical, anti-oppressive digital data-driven research in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that a reflexive data scholarship can emerge from the reintegration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is not a panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a road map for an alternative dataanalysis practice that is more power-sensitive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and contextaware perspective that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations, and scrutinises benefits and harm, an 'asymmetrically reciprocal' (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with eighty-four young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework productively recognises that digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum, and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavor. Data-driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity and the autonomy of research participants over their own data. keywords data studies for social justice; feminist data studies; ethics of care; feminist and postcolonial internet studies; young people; anti-oppressive methods feminist review 115 2017

The process of adjusting to a new country may carry important stressors for refugees. In the light of neoliberal policies, refugees are expected to become resilient in a local arrival infrastructure and perform a specific subjectivity based on gratefulness, adaptability, and digital sensitivity to successfully integrate. Drawing on a qualitative, in-depth case study with Syrians living in the Netherlands, this article explores the impact of the retreat of the welfare state and unfolding digital transitions on resilience tactics of marginalized people like refugees. While recognizing the systemic violence and historic trauma many refugees have experienced, we focus on how refugees are expected to and develop ways to become resilient. Three digital resilience tactics are discussed: digital social support, digital health, and digital identities. Social support was mainly sought from family, friends, organizations, and social media platforms, whereas refugees’ engagement in meaningful digital practices aimed at fostering health promotion and identity management. Our fieldwork resurfaces paradoxes of digital resilience as described by careful emotional digital labor refugees engage in when communicating with families, the role of socio-cultural factors in shaping refugees’ ICT (information and communication technology) adoption and use for health support, and negotiation of different and conflicting identity axes online. Finally, our study provides some insights into the implementation of more effective online and offline practices in the context of social and health support by host countries.

Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu's seminal manifesto on "the connected migrant," this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. The pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes Europe's colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present. Of special interest is an essay by the late Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of Europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan Europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on Eurocentrism and universal values. In this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called "refugee crisis" and the articulation of conflicting Europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies.

‘On digital crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond the national and mono-ethnic focus. We argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances, opting for a comparative and postcolonial framework that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. Internet applications make it possible to sustain new forms of diaspora and networks, which operate within and beyond Europe, making issues of ethnicity, nationality, race and class not obsolete but transformed. It is therefore important and timely to analyse how these reconfigurations take place and affect everyday life. Using a critical approach to digital tools that avoids utopian notions of connectivity and borderlessness, this article highlights the dyssymmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity. It further introduces the different contributions to the special issue, making connections and tracing relations among themes and methods and sketching main patterns for further research. It also offers a panorama of other related studies and projects in the field, which partake in a critical reassessment of the enabling power of digital media and their divisive implications for new forms of surveillance, online racism and ‘economic’ inequality, which we gather under the heading of postcolonial digital humanities.