Article detail · 2018
Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances
Journal
Social Media + Society- Year
- 2018
- Type
- article
Data source split
- YÖKSİS venue Social Media + Society
- OpenAlex OpenAlex enrichment (abstract, citations, topics)
Abstract
OpenAlex · English
This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide.
Topics
Citations
OpenAlex cited_by_count. Not a WoS or Scopus citation count; those sources have no separate column here.
295 citations
OpenAlex cited_by_count (cache / database)
7 publications in the local catalog that cite this work (OpenAlex reference match; not the full global list).
- Understanding Social Media Dependency, and Uses and Gratifications as a Communication System in the Migration Era: Syrian Refugees in Host Countries as a Case Study 2023
- Efficient detection of refugees and migrants in Turkey using convolutional neural network 2023
- Suriyelilerin Ulusötesi İlişkilerinde ve Göç Sonrası Uyum Süreçlerinde Sosyal Medyanın Rolü 2023
- Between Empowerment and Surveillance: Forced Migration and Information and Communication Technologies 2024
- Syrian Migrants' Experiences of “Irregular” Migration to Austria Interlaced by Virtual Networks: A Qualitative Study 2024
- Between Empowerment and Surveillance: Forced Migration and Information and Communication Technologies 2024
- Understanding Informal Communication Environment Effect on Social Inclusion 2021