"Smartphone refugees" : mobility, power regimes, and the impact of digital technologies
Jungbluth, Silke (2017)
2017
Master's Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research
Yhteiskuntatieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Social Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2017-03-14
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:uta-201703201312
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:uta-201703201312
Tiivistelmä
This thesis is an exploration into the role of new digital technologies for the mobile practices of forcefully displaced people. Based on data retrieved from qualitative interviews with Iraqi asylum seekers in Finland, as well as online observation of interactions on Facebook groups, it maps out how their use of mobile digital technology and media - in this work subsumed under the term ICT (information and communication technologies) - is embedded in unequal relations of power that frame, control, and contain their mobility as "illegal" or "irregular".
This study shows that ICT, particularly smartphones and social media, occupy an ambiguous role for the mobile practices of their users in the context of forced displacement. ICT enable the decentralization of information flows and the expansion of personal network connections. Technological devices can also be used to challenge imaginations of "refugeeness" by being employed as performative artifacts.
However, the role of ICT is still mainly determined by underlying grids of unequal power distribution, which marginalize and contain the mobile practices of groups of people and provide points of leverage to legal, political, and discursive regimes of mobility. The merging of virtual and physical trajectories through ICT allows those interested in containing certain forms of mobility to extrapolate the users' physical location and movement from their online activities, thus creating dangers of surveillance and control. Control over physical space is further becoming increasingly congruent with control over connectivity, due to the importance of immobile structures (such as cellular networks) for the functionality of ICT. Furthermore, access to ICT as a mobility resource is unequally distributed along lines of economic and social assets, as well as the skills to operate successfully within digital information landscapes. Therefore, this thesis argues that ICT in the context of forceful displacement need to be seen as embedded in grids of power setting the limits to the interconnected mobilities of people, objects, and information.
This study shows that ICT, particularly smartphones and social media, occupy an ambiguous role for the mobile practices of their users in the context of forced displacement. ICT enable the decentralization of information flows and the expansion of personal network connections. Technological devices can also be used to challenge imaginations of "refugeeness" by being employed as performative artifacts.
However, the role of ICT is still mainly determined by underlying grids of unequal power distribution, which marginalize and contain the mobile practices of groups of people and provide points of leverage to legal, political, and discursive regimes of mobility. The merging of virtual and physical trajectories through ICT allows those interested in containing certain forms of mobility to extrapolate the users' physical location and movement from their online activities, thus creating dangers of surveillance and control. Control over physical space is further becoming increasingly congruent with control over connectivity, due to the importance of immobile structures (such as cellular networks) for the functionality of ICT. Furthermore, access to ICT as a mobility resource is unequally distributed along lines of economic and social assets, as well as the skills to operate successfully within digital information landscapes. Therefore, this thesis argues that ICT in the context of forceful displacement need to be seen as embedded in grids of power setting the limits to the interconnected mobilities of people, objects, and information.