Call for Papers: Researching gender and digital media in migration and diaspora settings

Special Issue Call for Papers
Journal of Global Diaspora & Media (Journal)

‘Researching gender and digital media in migration and diaspora settings’

The UN officially acknowledged the critical role of digital media in enforcing girls’ and women’s rights for the first time during the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) held in March 2023. Digital media have been identified as essential tools to remove social and cultural barriers and give access to public spaces and networks. In the context of the increasing feminization of migration, this has become particularly true for migrant women. Digital media are an essential part of migrant women’s diasporic experience and in the process of resettlement and re-rooting.  This special issue thus sets out to explore the varied manifestations of gendered social realities across digital media in migration and diaspora settings. In a rather oxymoronic moment wherein people’s mobility is regularly challenged by reactionary, populist and nationalist political discourses, issues of migration continue to stay relevant for most national and transnational contexts. At the same time, in a postdigital moment, the existing ontological symbiosis between digital technologies and the social – through processes such as datafication and algorithmization –  gives way to novel social, economic and political configurations that need to be further investigated. Migration is among the social realities most intimately connected to the digital: be it in processes of transnational intimacy, in diaspora formation, as tools of support in forced or voluntary journeys, or to enforce border securitization and as part of larger transnational networks of labour exchange or exploitation. In the tension between migrant subjects’ agency and infrastructural prescriptions, new questions arise about the ways in which power dynamics still manifest or are reconfigured in the current migration-digital nexus.

As these processes unfold, we believe that questions of gender need to be considered anew. Starting from Joan Scott’s (1986) critical essay on the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis, we believe precisely that, in light of its long-lasting critical power and its disavowal of a fixed and static semiotic relationship between ‘men’ and ‘women’, it still holds the capacity to critically historicize precisely the post-migrant and postdigital terrains in which gendered norms continue to hold significant power. Previous studies have demonstrated the many ways in which the use of digital tools transform gendered relations by empowering their users, though at times also exposing them to negative stereotyping (Sobande, 2020) or the re-appropriation of anti-racist and feminist hashtags for racist discourses and hate speech (Riyadi and Widhiasti, 2020). Leurs (2019) has for instance shown that Moroccan-Dutch youth create alternative platforms for communication and belonging, with young women having developed their own specific strategies in the face of the gendered forms of racism they encounter online and offline. Digital spheres have also been shown to enable the formation of generation-specific gendered transnational ties (Ponzanesi, 2021), diasporic mothering practices (Candidatu, 2021; Veazey, 2021), dating habits in the diaspora (Chen and Liu, 2021), or queer migrant communities (Gopinath 2005; Szulc 2019). Digital spaces are also shaped by unequal access along gendered lines of social stratification (Henry, Vasil and Witt, 2022; Minchilli, 2021), representing both resources for women and sexual and gender minorities as well as battlegrounds for the definition of gendered norms, roles and practices. A gendered lens can also shed light on the circulation of representations of normative masculinity in digital spaces (Barry, 2023). And yet, at the intersection of migration/diaspora, gender and digital media studies, contributions around how gendered representations and norms circulate, and are being shaped and transformed across digital spaces, remain scattered.

Consequently, with this collection we seek to bring together research that investigates the gendered dimensions of digital engagements and practices in migration and diaspora contexts. The contribution of this special issue lies in the articulation of migration, digital and gender studies and the foregrounding of intersectional feminist approaches at the crossroads of these fields. By considering the dimensions of gender, ethnicity, class, and other intersecting social dimensions, the special issue can offer a nuanced understanding of how these factors shape the experiences of migrants in the postdigital era.

Target audience:

The special issue is addressed to scholars and experts from a diverse range of disciplines, such as gender studies, media and migration studies, media and culture studies, media anthropology.

Topics of interest include:

• Belonging, identities and citizenship in national and transnational contexts
• Community building, public engagement and activism
• Gender representations and debates in diaspora and migration contexts across digital spaces
• Digital media in relation to social and cultural reproduction practices
• Doing family: motherhood, care and the transnational mediation of intimacy
• Transnational queer and LGBTQIA+ online diasporic presence and activism
• Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on digital diasporic engagements
• Gendered aspects of digital media in post-humanitarian contexts
• Methodological considerations around digital ethnographies and netnographies attending to gender dynamics.

Submission of abstracts: 30 January 2024

Confirmation of acceptance: 8 March, 2024

Full manuscripts: 30 September, 2024

Peer review and revisions: October 2024 – January, 2025

Final Submission: February to May, 2025

Publication of the special issue: June 2025

 

Guest editors:

Laura Candidatu, Utrecht University: l.i.candidatu@uu.nl

Claudia Minchilli, University of Groningen, the Netherlands: c.minchilli@rug.nl

Nina Sahraoui, Paris Saclay University, PRINTEMPS, CNRS, France: nina.sahraoui@cnrs.fr