Smartphones as personal digital archives? Recentring migrant authority as curating and storytelling subjects

Abstract

This article addresses the smartphone as a complicated technology of forced migration: a device that accompanies those who move, but which also records and catalogues digital traces within life contexts of conflict, uprooting, migration and resettlement. We conceptualise smartphones as personal digital archives: migrants’ curation of their own stories on their own portable devices. Personal digital archives, we argue, reflect the migrant gaze and constitute mobile subaltern subjects’ record of forced migration. Inductively learning from fieldwork conducted across five sites over 5 years, we analyse how the personal digital archive records and reflects the mediation of migration in its three dimensions: symbolic, affective and material. By focussing on personal digital archives, we recentre the authority of migrants as witnessing subjects of their own life stories. Their archives as autonomous migrant records provide a powerful basis to reflect upon and potentially contest mainstream western journalism cultures, which too often reduce migration to a spectacle and the migrant to a dehistoricised figure with little agency or voice.

The cultural customization of TikTok: subaltern migrant workers and their digital cultures

“…Ilyas, 2020). This finding complements Georgiou and Leurs (2022) research on the value of digital records for migrants in challenging mainstream media narratives.…”

“…Workers’ creation and distribution of content on the platform became an avenue to extend digital visibilities in their formats of expression. Scholars have discussed how precarious migrants organizing on new media applications have implications for altering power relations (Leurs, 2017). The customizability of the TikTok application enabled MCWs to edit audio-visual content.…”

“…Digital visibilities through entertainment, information sharing, or showing precarious conditions are resistive strategies in a system that keeps them structurally absent and erased. Georgiou and Leurs (2022) similarly argue that such digital archives are powerful in how they challenge inadequate, narrow, and problematic representations of migrants in mainstream media. Mainstream media in Singapore indeed did pick up on the trend of migrant workers' TikTok use (Chua, 2020), but the implications of sharing what might be deemed subversive have yet to be fully understood.…”

“…Kikkawa et al (2021) conceptualize migtech as “technology that assists and empower migrants” (2021: 60) to push for rights-centered conditions for migrants. How migrants posture their identities via social media are enactments of their agency in organizing and claiming their rights (Leurs, 2017).…”

“…In the following sections, the literature on marginalized migrants and their digital cultures are discussed. Migrant motivations to participate in social media content creation aid understanding of how migrants organize content on social media (Leurs, 2017). MCWs’ TikTok produsage tells us how they navigate visibility in the context of hyper(in)visibility and invisibility in the host country.…”