The Mediation of Hope: Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances Within Iraqi Refugee Households in Jordan

Abstract

Worldwide, refugees are increasingly living in uncertainty for undetermined periods of time, waiting for an enduring legal and social solution. In this article, I consider how this experience of waiting is perceived through and influenced by the ubiquity of transnational digital connections, which play a central role in Iraqi refugee households in Jordan. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Iraqi refugees in Jordan's capital Amman to further understand the use of digital technologies in everyday experiences of prolonged displacement. Waiting is an intrinsic affective phenomenon, colored by hope and anxiety. I argue that affective affordances-the potential of different media forms to bring about affects like hope and anxiety-enable Iraqi refugees to reorient themselves to particular places and people. As "no futures" are deemed possible in Jordan or Iraq, digital technologies serve as orientation devices enabling them to imagine futures elsewhere. Through the interplay of media forms, the Iraqi refugees refract their own lives via the experiences of friends and family members who have already traveled onward and who in their perception are able to rebuild a dignified life. Transnational digital connections not only provide a space for hope and optimistic ideas of futures elsewhere but also help to sustain one's experience of immobility. I argue that using the imagination can be understood as an act of not giving in to structural constraints and might be crucial to making Iraqi refugee life in Jordan bearable.

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.…”

“…At the same time, the current literature has focused mostly on refugees' use of mobile technologies in Global North countries (Leurs & Smets, 2018). Notable exceptions include scholarship on the appropriation of mobile phones among forced migrants in border spaces or refugee camps in Turkey (Smets, 2018, 2019), Kenya, Jordan (Twigt, 2018; Wall, Campbell, & Janbek, 2017), as well as in resettlement and displacement contexts in Brazil (Alencar, 2020), Ethiopia (Leurs, 2014), and a few others. Although this growing body of work still has critical gaps and shortcomings, it warrants a review of its own.…”

Transnational connectivity and the affective paradoxes of digital care labour: Exploring how young refugees technologically mediate co-presence

“…To balance the affective paradoxes of digital care labour of remaining in contact with loved ones still living through civil war, Amani and her close circle of Syrian friends living in the European diaspora together have embraced exchanging letters as a self-care oriented communicative practice. Here we see how young connected refugees selectively take up the distinct 'affective affordances' (Twigt, 2018: 2) of writing and exchanging letters over the instantaneity and always-on social media affordances to maintain various forms of co-presence with diverging scales of time and space. For some connections -particularly those with loved ones living through hardship -they feel affectively compelled to maintain synchronous and instantaneous links; with others who have also fled and now live in the diaspora, alternative co-presences are established based on different communicative modalities and rhythms which allow for contemplation and reflection.…”

Careful Co-presence: The Transnational Mediation of Emotional Intimacy

“…There is a small but growing scholarship on how digital media forms are used to communicate and experience emotions in contexts of transnational mobility (Alinejad, 2011;Leurs, 2014;Madianou, 2016;Nedelcu, 2012;Schrooten, 2012;Twigt, 2018;Wilding, 2006;Witteborn, 2014). This literature has touched on a range of different migration phenomena, approached from various disciplinary perspectives.…”