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

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 digi...

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Veröffentlicht in:Journalism (London, England) Jg. 23; H. 3; S. 668 - 689
Hauptverfasser: Georgiou, Myria, Leurs, Koen
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: London, England SAGE Publications 01.03.2022
Schlagworte:
symbolic
Personal digital archive
affectivity
forced migration
materiality
ISSN:1464-8849, 1741-3001
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung: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.
ISSN:1464-8849
1741-3001
DOI:10.1177/14648849211060629