Digital Resilience Tactics of Syrian Refugees in the Netherlands: Social Media for Social Support, Health, and Identity

Abstract

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.

Impact of COVID-19 on Migrants’ Access to Primary Care: A National Qualitative Study

“…Our findings provide insight into factors likely to impact on COVID-19 vaccine roll-out in migrant communities, concurring with previous studies that demonstrate that migrants may trust their social networks over medical professionals (22) and that they may be more likely than the general population to believe COVID-19 misinformation (23) and mistrust COVID-19 vaccine research (21). Specifically engaging diverse migrant groups in the UK, and co-designing interventions to facilitate COVID-19 vaccine uptake, is therefore a crucial next step.…”

Introduction: Marginality and Social Media

“…Every article in this collection focuses on a population that is significantly under-represented in scholarly research more generally. Populations of study include people of color (Davis, this issue; Smith et al, this issue), refugees (Udwan et al, this issue), LGBTQ + people (Birnholtz et al, this issue), people with disabilities (Trevisan, this issue), indigenous people (Carlson & Frazer, this issue; Lupien, this issue; Richez et al, this issue), and people from the Global South (Birnholtz et al, this issue; Soriano & Cabañes, this issue). Although social media have many limitations (centralized corporate control, limited reach to some parts of the world, and financial barriers to entry, to name just a few), the possibility to expand populations of study through techniques like observation, asynchronous participation, and flexible interview scheduling was embraced by most in this collection.…”

“…In this special issue, it is notable that the majority of manuscripts employ qualitative methods, including interviews (Birnholtz et al, this issue; Carlson & Frazer, this issue; Lupien, this issue; Soriano & Cabañes, this issue; Udwan et al, this issue; focus groups [Trevisan, this issue], and discourse analysis [Davis, this issue]). Qualitative methods have long been the dominant method used in the study of marginalized groups (Barron, 1999), partially because of the nature of questions of marginality as well as the possibility of elevating voices of the marginalized.…”

Mobile communication and refugees: An analytical review of academic literature

“…In their study on the role of smartphones in refugees' journeys, Gillespie, Osseiran, and Cheesman (2018) highlight the importance of focusing on refugees' digital practices across time and space in order to assess the dynamic and fluid nature of technological affordances, as well as the agency that refugees can exercise in diverse contexts of exile. Although media and migration scholars have shown an increased interest in applying the notion of affordances to understand the possibilities of action offered by mobile phones on refugees across different settings (Dahya & Dryden‐Peterson, 2017; Gillespie et al, 2018; Kaufmann, 2018; Twigt, 2018; Udwan, Leurs, & Alencar, 2020; Witteborn, 2018), the relatively low dissemination of articles on this specific concept does not allow for its use as a criterion to collect scientific contributions. In this review article, the concept of affordances is adopted as an analytic tool to examine the ways in which existing studies address the possibilities and vulnerabilities of mobile communications, the social conditions, and the agency of refugees in engaging with mobile technologies in the different temporal and spatial dimensions of their migration trajectories.…”

“…Smartphones are considered as “pocket archives” that allow refugees “to position themselves as political subjects of communication rights online” (p. 693). Simultaneously, relational analyses of host country's integration systems and refugees' engagements with smartphones highlight the relevance of support communities in developing “digital resilience tactics” to make do with neoliberal refugee policies and infrastructures in the Netherlands (Udwan et al, 2020).…”