Digital Europe and its Discontent

Activity: Talk or presentationInvited talkAcademic

Description

This talk proposes 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 rewalling 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 rearticulated beyond the current deterministic debate of public versus private, inclusion and exclusion, agency and tradition.


Period2 Jun 20193 Jun 2019
Event titleDigitized Global Mobilities: The role of new media and digitization in the security approaches of the refugee crisis
Event typeWorkshop
LocationUtrecht, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • migration
  • mobilities
  • security