We are very proud of Simone Aumaj, who won the ECHO Awards 2019 for WO.

The ECHO Award is given for extraordinary academic achievements and social involvement. This year, the ECHO Award celebrates its 25th anniversiry. The ECHO Award is an initiative by the Expertise Centre for Diversity Policy in higher education.

This award is directed at making excellent students with a non-western migration background visible and directed at students who distinguish themselves by being socially engaged, specifically in the field of diversity and inclusion. The ceremony was held at Loyens & Loeff Amsterdam and symbolized the 25th anniversary of the work ECHO: Expertise Center for Diversity and Policy has been doing over the last 25 years.

Simone is a graduate student at Utrecht University, and was put forward for the award by Sandra Ponzanesi. Simone was awarded the ECHO Award for the way she manages to connect her individual challenges and ambitions with the shared struggle of young people in society.

For more information on the ECHO Award, see here. A full overview of this year’s ECHO Award winners and their work can be found here.

At the conference ‘Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood: Integration, Community, and Co-Habitation’ at University College Dublin Sandra Ponzanesi gave a keynote lecture on ‘Digital Cosmpolitanism. Local Networks and Transnational Communities’. The conference was organized by the Humanities Institute (UCD) and the School of Advanced Studies (University of  London), and took place on September 25-26, 2019. 

Transnational neighbourhoods are frequently depicted as the ‘other’ and a ‘deviant terrain’. However, voices from within often emphasise different perceptions and have the potential to challenge and counter discourses emerging in the context of the rapid rise of populist right-wing parties across Europe that aim to reinstate or “protect” ethnic nationalism.

Against this backdrop, the conference seeked to shift focus by exploring transcultural encounters in the urban neighbourhood. The conference focused on the urban neighbourhood as a social microcosm that allows for a more nuanced discussion of transculturality as lived practice. The urban neighbourhood is local but not provincial; it is a fluid space in which various temporal and spatial axes intersect; it is the locus where diverse trans/cultural practices can engender togetherness as well as differences and conflict. It is the contact zone where disparate cultures meet in often highly asymmetrical relations, fostering processes of hybridisation, creolisation and neoculturation.

For more information, see here. The full conference program can be found here.

Prof. Myria Georgiou (London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Media and Communication) visited Utrecht University on September 20, 2019 to lead a masterclass on “Media and the City.”

About the speaker

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She holds a PhD in Sociology from LSE, an MSc in Journalism from Boston University and a BA in Sociology from Panteion University, Athens. Her research focuses on media and the city; urban technologies and politics of connection; and the ways in which migration and diaspora are politically, culturally and morally constituted in the context of mediation. For more than 20 years she has been conducting and leading cross-national and transurban research across Europe and between British and American cities. She has also worked as a journalist for BBC World Service, Greek press, and the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation.

She has published widely on questions of identity construction within mediated urban and transnational spaces. Her publications include: Media and the City. Cosmopolitanism and Difference (2013), Gender, Migration and the Media (2013), Transnational Lives and the Media: Reimagining Diasporas (2007), Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities (2006).

Sandra Ponzanesi guest edited a special issue of Television and New Media, entitled ‘Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: (Re)Mapping Connectivity and Belonging’ (20(6): 547-648). The issue can be found here. 

This special issue charts new directions in digital media and migration studies from a gendered, postcolonial, and multidisciplinary perspective. In particular, the focus is on the ways in which the experience of displacement is resignified and transformed by new digital affordances from different vantage points, engaging with recent developments in datafication, visualization, biometric technologies, platformization, securitization, and extended reality (XR) as part of a drastically changed global mediascape. This issue explores the role of new media technologies in rethinking the dynamics of migration and globalization by focusing in particular on the role of migrant users as “connected” and active participants, as well as “screened” and subject to biometric datafication, visualization, and surveillance. 

With contributions from

Sandra Ponzanesi: Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: (Re)Mapping Connectivity and Belonging

Arjun Appadurai: Traumatic Exit, Identity Narratives, and the Ethics of Hospitality

Roopika Risam: Beyond the Migrant “Problem”: Visualizing Global Migration

Mirca Madianou: The Biometric Assemblage: Surveillance, Experimentation, Profit, and the Measuring of Refugee Bodies

Myria Georgiou: City of Refuge or Digital Order? Refugee Recognition and the Digital Governmentality of Migration in the City

Radha S. Hegde: Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border

Joost Raessens: Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mixed Reality Installation Carne y Arena

Prof. Radha Hegde visited Utrecht University on June 24 to lead a masterclass on “Mediating Migration” and give a lecture on “Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border”.

Masterclass on “Mediating Migration”

Grasping the connections between media and migration today requires going beyond causal paradigms and reductive disciplinary boundaries. Recent works in media theory and the evolving cultural and material pressures of migration call for more integrative analyses that approach these topics through constitutive logics of assemblage and infrastructure. The concept of mediation is an important and evolving analytic to this end, speaking to entangled, transnational, and multi-directional influences across mobility, technologies, identity and sense-making today.

This masterclass discussed current theoretical engagements with mediation in dialogue with contemporary formations in citizenship, borders and mass movements. It argued that mediation is central to both the material and representational aspects of virtually all components of migration, circulating and reconstituting the grounds upon which mobility and migration are understood and enacted.

PCI/Doing Gender Lecture on “Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border”

Technologized border regimes transform bodies with great speed into data and embed them within archives of suspicion. Examining the performance of surveillance rituals directed towards Muslim women at airports, this presentation discusses how classifications at digital frontiers reproduce familiar patterns of discrimination. The objections raised by Muslim women about the circulation of their cellular data serve as a point of departure to rethink national beloninging in terms of the new itinerancy of data, corporeal transparancy and the digital archive as expression and identification.

Sandra Ponzanesi was chair at this event. The lecture was jointly organized by the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). More information about the event can be found here.

Speaker

Radha S. Hegde is Professor at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Mediating Migration (2016), editor of Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (2011), and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2017). Currently she serves as the Dahlem International Network Professor for Gender Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

At the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, Sandra Ponzanesi gave a plenary lecture on the relation between migration and diaspora in time of digital connectivity, “Diasporas: Migration, Media and Affect”, at the conference on “Digital Diasporas: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”.

Diaspora figurations provide new possible cartographies to map the self in relation to increasingly complex patterns of globalization and localization, avoiding closures and the negative effects of identity politics. This talk explored how these new worlds on the move are mutually shaped by the affordances and possibilities offered by new digital technologies and the transformation of border politics. What are digital diasporas and how do they come to encode transformed notions of home, transnational belonging and postcolonial spatiality? How is difference rearticulated online and how is affect reshaped through connectivity, by remediating distance and intimacy. This intervention proposed a critical overview of the notion of the digital diaspora, and its many disciplinary takes and media-specific variations, in order to grasp contemporary human mobility as shaped by and constitutive of an unevenly interconnected world and new patterns of belonging.

More information on the conference and its keynote and plenary speakers can be found here. For the full conference programme, see here.

Sandra Ponzanesi gave a keynote on “Digital Europe and its Discontent” at the conference on “Digital Global Mobilities. The Role of New Media and Digitization in the Security Approaches of the Refugee Crisis”.

“Digital Europe and its Discontent”

In her talk on “Digital Europe and its Discontent” Ponzanesi proposed an intervention into the notion of Europe as a closed Fortress by foregrounding migrant mobility and digital connectedness as part of everyday life, but also pertaining to new forms of citizenship and urban cosmopolitan belonging.

Though migration to and within Europe is nothing new, the recent ‘refugee crisis’ has sparked intense debate on the issues of borders, identities and belonging. Austerity measures and intensified high-tech surveillance have replaced hospitality and possibilities for circular migration, generating new bordering regimes that are not just material but also epistemological and technological. While aware of these new entrenchments and virtual re-walling, the focus here is on the possibilities that technologies enhance to stay in touch with close and far-off communities, creating diasporic hubs that allow for new forms of sociability and intimacies. Focusing on everyday digitized practices allows for a more complex, yet realistic, assessment of how gender and racial presence, agency and emancipation are re-articulated beyond the current deterministic debate of public versus private, inclusion and exclusion, agency and tradition.

The conference

This conference on “Digitized Global Mobilities” was organized by Veronica Nagy for UGlobe and took place at Utrecht University. More information can be found here and in the full conference programme.

Sandra Ponzanesi gave a keynote address on “Colonial Ruins: The Mediterranean Crisis in Postcolonial Cinema” at the conference “On the Ruins and Margins of European Identity in Cinema: European Identity in the Era of Mass Migration” (University of Tours).

This talk pointed out the relationship between the colonial past and Europe’s present migrant crisis, through the anaysis of recent European documentary films that challenge stereotypical representations of the European South and refugees. This analysis shows how the past returns to write the present, starting from present-day hegemonic powers, by highlighting the importance of different shores such as those of Libya and Lampedusa through different times, regimes and cinematic memory.

The conference

This conference was organized by Prof. Temenuga Trifonova for Le Studium, and tok place at the University of Tours. The purpose of this conference was to reflect on contemporary debates around the concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘European identity’ through an examination of European films from 2000 to the present dealing with various aspects of globalization (the refugee crisis, labor migration, the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic violence, international tourism, neoliberalism, transnational commodification, post-colonialism, transnational capital etc.). These examinations enable reflections on the ambiguities and contradictory aspects of the figure of the migrant and the ways in which this figure challenges us to rethink core concepts such as European identity, European citizenship, justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance and hospitality in the post-national context of ephemerality, volatility, and contingency that finds people looking for firmer markers of identity.

For more information, see here.

On March 6, Sandra Ponzanesi gave a research seminar on ‘Postcolonial Media Studes: Media, Migrants and Digital Diasporas’  at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.

This talk proposed a joint intervention into the field of postcolonial theory and media studies, highlighting their commonalities and areas of contestation. Though there are obvious points of connection and convergence between the two fields, a postcolonial intervention into media representations and practices is strongly needed. This is particularly urgent with reference to issues of migration and diaspora in order to grasp the consequences and implications of decolonization for media cultures.

The talk drew from the ConnectingEurope project, which focuses on the relationship between migration and digital technologies, and the ways in which new forms of connectivity reshape patterns of mobility, diaspora and affect for migrant women who moved to Europe’s major cities.

For more information, see here.

On March 4, Prof. Cindy Horst led a masterclass at Utrecht University on multisidedness and ethnographic methods.

Prof. Horst is Research Director an Research Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

On 5 and 6 February 2019 the conference Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics took place in Utrecht.

Who are the postcolonial intellectuals? Which of them are currently most influential? What kind of intellectual activity do collectivities, networks and movements gathering around issues of race and citizenship perform? How do postcolonial academics, artists, writers, parties and movements respond to current timely issues in the European landscape, such as migration, citizenship and the legacies of colonialism? How do they contribute to a new idea of ‘Europe’ and relate to Western categories of modernity? Are their critical tools effective enough?

PIN

The PIN – Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network – is a NWO (Dutch Research Council) funded project that brings more than 25 European academic partners together. The PIN not only focuses on postcolonial intellectuals as outspoken individuals, but also challenges the traditional definition of the ‘public intellectual’ by emphasizing the role of artists, writers, activists and social movements in shaping postcolonial publics and knowledge. Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network brings together an international and interedisciplinary network of scholars to investigate the role of postcolonial public intellectuals as crucial actors in renewing the function of the humanities and of democratic participation in Europe.

Organizer

Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University, Utrecht)

Keynote speakers

Prof. Kaiama Glover, Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies
Barnard College, Columbia University

Prof. Awam Amkpa, Associate Professor
New York University | Tisch School of the Arts

The full conference programma is available, see here.
For more information, see here.

On January 25th, Sandra Ponzanesi participated in the second Full Circle debate, entitled Triptych #2: Technomigrant, at Full Circle House in Brussels. 

The debate focused on open borders and the future of migration, exploring technology’s transformative impact on borders and world migration. When, several years ago, pictures of newly arrived migrants taking selfies as they reached European soil were often shared in media outlets and on social media, many watchers and readers were momentarily confused. Carrying a smartphone, and taking a selfie, appeared to be at odds with the image of people fleeing from war and/or poverty. As smartphones, social media, Whatsapp and geolocation become more ubiquitous across the world, it is clear that technology has changed modern migration significantly. With these developments, global technologies render phyiscal borders pointless. However, new technologies also feed into tougher security measures, increased surveillance, and a thicker European fortress.

Other invited speakers were dr. Leo Lucassen (Leiden University) and architect Allison Killing.

Migration, Digital Media and Emotion

Guest edited by Donya Alinejad and Sandra Ponzanesi 

In contexts of migration and transnational mobility, spheres of lived sociality have long spanned borders and nation-state territories. More recently, however, the use of mobile digital devices has become ubiquitous within many forms of migratory mobility, especially when they come paired with the latest iteration of Web 2.0, or “the social web.” Yet these developments in media technologies not only allow for information exchange but also foster a globally mediatized emotional exchange, which leads to new interactions between media, migration, and emotion. As the use of these devices and platforms penetrates the most intimate relationships and exchanges shaped by transnational distances and mobility, we are reminded anew of how migration has always been shaped by more than rational, economic considerations. Continue reading here.

International Journal of Cultural Studies is a fully peer-reviewed journal and a leading venue for scholarship committed to rethinking cultural practices, processes, texts and infrastructures beyond traditional national frameworks and regional biases. Established to revitalize cultural studies against the dangers of parochialism and intellectual ossification, the journal interrogates what culture means, and what culture does, across global and local scales of power and action, diverse technologies and forms of mediation…

Deadlines:

• 15 February, 2019
  Proposals of 500-750 words should include an abstract and a short description explaining whether/how previous or current research relates to the special issue theme. Please also include a short bio of 250 words including name, affiliation, and contact details.
• Notification of acceptance/selection: 31 March, 2019
• Deadline for full papers: 31 August, 2019

Please send submissions to d.alinejad@uu.nl and s.ponzanesi@uu.nl. We look forward to receiving your submissions. For more information read here.

7th European Communication Conference

Our team was present at the ECREA 2018 in Lugano.

Koen Leurs (chair of the Diaspora, Migration and the Media section, DMM) presented on “Connected migrants and digital migration studies in Europe”

Melis Mevsimler (Young scholar representative of the DMM section) presented on: “Divided nation, divided diaspora: Crossroads of gender and homeland politics in everyday lives of migrant women from Turkey in London”.

Claudia Minchilli presented on: “Being Afro-Italian and Somali: Digital connectedness and shades of diasporic identity and belongings among women of Somali background in postcolonial Italy”.

Media, Migration and the Rise of Nationalism
Comparing European and Asian Experiences and Perspective

Organizers: Koen Leurs (Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and Tomohisa Hirata (Associate Professor, Faculty of Social and Information Studies, Gunma University, Japan)

This Seminar was held from 19^th to 21stSep. 2018, at 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, URL: http://www.3331.jp/).

Sandra Ponzanesi chaired a masterclass on ‘Paradoxes of Postcolonial Media Cultures and presented a paper on ‘Digital Cosmopolitanism. Notes from the Underground’

Laura Candidatu presented a paper during the masterclass session on ‘Revisiting the “Connected Migrant” Through Cultural Reproductive Labor and Mothering Practices”

Koen Leurs presented a paper on ‘Digital Migration Studies: The Case of Young Connected Migrants Interfacing with Difference.’

Donya Alinejad presented a paper on ‘The Politics of Intimate Transnational Connections.’

Diaspora and mapping methodologies: tracing transnational digital connections with ‘mattering maps’

Donya Alinejad, Laura Candidatu, Melis Mevsimler, Claudia Minchilli, Sandra Ponzanesi and Fernando N. van der Vlist

First published: 23 May 2018

Abstract

There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investigations to approach diaspora in static ways that contrast with theories of diaspora as a dynamic cultural formation. On the other hand, qualitative, ethnographic work tends not to engage with digital methods and quantitative data‐driven investigation. In this article, we sketch this methodological and disciplinary disconnect and address it by proposing a model for understanding digitally mediated formations of diaspora that combines digital methods techniques with a sensitivity to ethical and theoretical discussions of migration and diaspora. Drawing on interpretive epistemologies and feminist research ethics, we present a case study analysis of a locally informed, Turkish–Dutch issue. We argue for a method that produces ‘mattering maps’. This involves tracking and visualizing digital traces of an issue across web platforms (Google Search results, Facebook pages, and Instagram posts) and integrating this with an analysis of the face‐to‐face interview responses of a key issue actor.

https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12197

Read the full text

PDF

Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: Paradoxes of Connectivity and Belonging

Tuesday, April 10, 2018 – Wednesday, April 11, 2018
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room

Organizer

Sandra Ponzanesi – Visiting Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University/Professor Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University.

Keynote Speakers

Arjun Appadurai
Paulette Goddard – Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Mirca Madianou – Professor in the Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London

Check the full list of speakers here. 

About the conference

The image of Syrian refugees with a smartphone shooting ‘selfies’ upon reaching dry land has captured the international imagination (Chouliaraki, 2017; Kunstman, 2017; Risam, forthcoming 2018). It suggests an image of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), which is shaped by a profound ambivalence: migrants are expected to be people fleeing from war, violence, and poverty; they are not expected to be ‘digital natives’, equipped with technologies to navigate their difficult journeys. While smartphones are accessible, affordable, and easy to use, in the realm of the public imaginary the image of the disenfranchised and disconnected migrant remains that of the ‘have nots’, and therefore subject to ‘high tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2006, p. 73). This posits the figuration of the migrant as outside the realm of development and modern forms of communication, disenfranchised and vulnerable in order to be worthy of international aid and pity (Boltanski, 20000; Ticktin, 2008). And yet smartphones are ubiquitous, and migrants have been early adopters and heavy users of technologies for the simple reason that these technologies are ingrained in their daily practices and everyday lives, which often involve perilous crossings but also the need to keep in touch with the home front and their diasporic communities. The promise of connectivity that is guaranteed even under duress becomes fraught with the profound disconnection brought about by the disciplining gaze of Western media and publics. It is, therefore, crucial to focus on the specific way in which digital technologies bridge or magnify the gap in migration between geographical distance and digital proximity. How are affect, intimacy, and belonging negotiated online in the face of forced migration and expulsions (Sassen, 2012) but also of circular migration, expatriation, and transnational movements?

This conference aims to cover a broad range of conflict-related issues on migration in a digital age. Using the latest insights from a range of interdisciplinary fields, it will explore theories of displacement such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and nomadism, and the transformations brought about by the digital revolution, through the analysis of virtual communities, social media platforms, and digital activism. It will also focus on media production and the regulation of information on forced migrants in a ‘post-truth’ era: fake news; the humanitarianism-securitization nexus, migration management, social and political conflicts related to migrant and diaspora communities, radicalization and online counter-terrorism, hate speech and racism, but also solidarities, activism, and protest.

For more info e-mail Sandra Ponzanesi: sp3630@columbia.edu
Or follow the updates on the programme and schedule here.

The conference is a collaboration between Columbia University, Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the ERC project ConnectingEurope and other co-sponsors (Columbia University, Division of Humanities, New York University, The New School, IRWGS, Council for European Studies)

Sandra Ponzanesi gives a keynote lecture (6 April) at Harvard University for the conference “Can the Migrant Speak”.

“Call Me by My Name: Mediterranean Transmissions”

“Can the Migrant Speak?” engages with the figure and agency of the migrant. It is not often that
we hear about – or listen to – the migratory experience from those undergoing it themselves. By
asking this question during a time of tumultuous political change, we directly address the roles of
our disciplines, and academia as a whole, in relation to this issue that continues to shape lives
across the globe in powerful ways.​

While the term is linguistically unambiguous – the migrant is the person who moves – its uses
have always been fraught. What are the politics of naming figures ranging from refugees and
undocumented individuals to foreign professionals and “expats” under the single word
“migrant”? How do people negotiate between various labels, and what tensions emerge between
personal assumption and external imposition of them?

Migration is not a homogeneous phenomenon. We want to address the way certain migrants are
situated at the intersection of identities – language, race, gender, class, religion – that complicate
and fundamentally shape their experience of migration.

If movement across borders and oceans characterizes literal migration, what are other forms of
migration that are equally significant but often overlooked? How do we understand the
movement between languages, the hybridization of identities, and the fusion of cultures? How
does climate change form landscapes and movement? If the text itself constitutes an act of
migration, what are its frontiers? How does viewing a text as a mobile entity versus seeing it as a
static, fixed object transform one’s experience of it? How is literature (as a discipline) itself
migrating as new literary objects (digital archives, Facebook posts, Snapchat stories, interactive
maps) pop up onto our radar?
​
In addition to accepting conference papers, we seek to widen the scope of our discussion beyond
academia by welcoming texts and objects that nonetheless have the power to theorize: personal
narratives, documentaries, creative pieces. Thus we hope to address the problematics of
presentations about the “words of the migrant” when voices around the world – including those
of our own community members – continue to be silenced.

On February 7, Sandra Ponzanesi gave a talk titled “Digital Migration: Troubleshooting Gender, Diaspora, and Affect” as a visiting professor at New York University.