Digital Divides in the Era of Widespread Internet Access: Migrant Youth Negotiating Hierarchies in Digital Culture

Abstract

In this chapter I analyse the digital practices of migrant youth as situated, power-laden, pleasurable and sometimes painful everyday experiences. I develop Walter Benjamin's theorisations of the nineteenth century "arcade" or commercial passageway (Benjamin W (1999) The Arcades project. Harvard University Press, Cambridge), together with Nirmal Puwar's understanding of how non-normative bodies become "space invaders" (Puwar N (2004) Space invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place. Berg, Oxford) upon entering certain domains, in order to conceptualise the digital spatial biases of online platforms and their subversions. The argument builds on survey, interview and ethnographic data gathered as part of the interdisciplinary research project Wired Up. Digital media as innovative socialisation practices for migrant youth run by Utrecht University. I argue fi rstly how offl ine societal power relations related to race and ethnicity, religion and gender relations travel online and create new digital divides that go beyond computer ownership and Internet access. Secondly, I argue how Internet platforms become spaces for the negotiation of power relations, digital belonging and greater cultural understanding in an increasingly multicultural world.

“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.…”