Mobiles and ‘making do’: Exploring the affective,digital practices of refugee women waiting in Greece

Abstract

In the wake of the so-called European migrant crisis, migration scholars have zoomed in on digital technologies and mobility. Seldom addressed, however, are the affective entanglements of migrant digital practices. Yet, as this article argues, waiting is a deeply affective and embodied experience, mediated by information and communications technologies, and tempered both spatially and temporally. Using the cultural politics of emotion as an entry point, and a reflexive and vulnerable methodology, this article explores the digital practices of 15 women waiting in a refugee camp in Greece. In aiming to more justly represent their experiences, this article seeks to move beyond spatial descriptions of migration, as well as to unsettle prevalent discourses of displacement as a liminal condition. Herein, I use the dialectic of strategy and tactics to explore the ways in which smartphones are mobilised in order to ‘make do’ with protracted experiences of displacement. Three mediated practices of ‘making do’ are explored: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care; mediated family practices as a tactic of hope; and nature photography as a tactic of creativity. In the context of a dehumanising strategy of migration containment, I will argue that everyday tactics of self-care, hope and creativity constitute affective forms of agency.

Keywords

Affect agency displacement making do refugee women smartphones tactics waiting

But when you leave your family and you feeling it’s maybe dangerous, you are feeling you are not here. You are here, but you are not here. You are safe, but you . . . are there.

–Rania

Rania (24 years old) is from Deir ez-Zor, in eastern Syria. She hopes that soon she and her toddler son can join her husband in Germany, although she has not yet had an asylum interview to discuss her resettlement options.¹ Every day, she waits for a phone call from the asylum office in Athens, and she frequently contacts her lawyer to see whether there are updates on her case. In order to overcome the negative feelings that accrue from living apart from her loved ones, Rania regularly talks with her family over the phone. For Rania, and refugees² like her, having access to a smartphone is essential for negotiating the anxieties and ambivalences produced through protracted experiences of waiting. Yet, literature on media and migration rarely addresses the affective entanglements of migrant digital practices (notable exceptions include Leurs, 2016; Twigt, 2018; and Witteborn, 2014). While recent scholarship has zoomed in on migrant smartphone use (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2017; Gillespie et al., 2016; Zijlstra and Liempt, 2017), narratives tend to focus on migration journeys, and often centre the experiences of men. However, such a focus on (men’s) digital journeys reinforces gendered binaries of active/passive, moving/waiting, where men are the ones who move and women are the ones left behind. In an effort to trouble gendered binaries, this article explores the ways refugee women demonstrate agency while waiting to travel onwards. My aim is neither to romanticise nor exceptionalise women’s experiences of waiting; rather, I argue that it is necessary to consider the types of mobilities that are possible, and may be engaged, while waiting. I am particularly interested in ordinary, mundane practices – everyday actions which allow individuals to persevere. I choose to explore affective digital practices because, like emotions, smartphone use is highly gendered (Pink et al., 2015). Taking the cultural politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2014) as an entry point, this article uses the dialectic of strategy and tactics (De Certeau, 1984) to explore refugee women’s digital practices as tactical interventions in the regime of waiting, specifically, the ways in which smartphones are mobilised in order to ‘make do’ (De Certeau, 1984) with protracted experiences of displacement. In my argumentation, I draw from 15 distinctly situated, affective and embodied accounts gathered at a refugee camp in mainland Greece. This feminist research project centres a reflexive and vulnerable methodology, meaning I aim to make generative how questions of ethics, power and positionality are negotiated in the field, and may be represented more justly in the writing and textual analysis of that fieldwork. This article is structured as follows. First, I connect feminist affect theory to studies of migrant digital practices. I then discuss intersectional analyses of space and time in an effort to move beyond spatial descriptions of displacement, and to politicise the representation of refugee temporalities as liminal conditions. I conclude the theoretical section with an explanation of how mediated practices of ‘making do’ constitute particular forms of agency. Next, I discuss the fieldwork contexts, which includes reflection upon my own positioning, as well as my understanding and practice of a reflexive, vulnerable methodology. In the first empirical section, I explore non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care, whereby refugees forego mainstream news media in favour of news shared by their personal networks. The second empirical section explores mediated family practices as a tactic of hope, which serves to hopefully orient refugees towards the future. The final empirical section explores nature photography as a tactic of creativity, whereby youth draw upon the smartphone’s (affective) affordances in order to engage in emotive mobilities. As will become evident in this article, affect is the red thread that guides this project.

Smartphones as affective and embodied objects

هوه إنّو حكيت إنّو عّم احكي مع زوجي أطمئن عليه و يطمئن علينا

³ أحسن شي ‘beautiful’ هي أحسن شي

I can talk to my husband and make sure he is fine and he also can make sure that we are fine. That’s the best thing, ‘beautiful’, the best thing.

–Farah

Farah (27 years old) lives in camp with her three children (5, 8 and 10 years old). Although a slow reunification process keeps her husband (who lives in Germany) at a distance, the intense feelings of love Farah has for, and shares with, him (through their smartphones) facilitate ‘affective forms of reorientation’ (Ahmed, 2014: 8) that keep him close. Farah chats with her husband on Facebook Messenger and voice and video calls him on WhatsApp; they speak ‘every day, every two or three hours’.⁴ This is their way of practising co-presence of ‘feeling and being together’ (Nedelcu and Wyss, 2016: 204) at a distance. In her study of the cultural politics of emotion, Sara Ahmed (2014) contends that emotions are more than ‘psychological states’ – they are deeply related to ‘social and cultural practices’ (p. 9). Affects are relational, shaped over time by contact with, or orientations towards and away from, objects and others, and the impressions left behind. While Ahmed’s use of emotion (rather than affect) has been critiqued (e.g. Wetherell, 2015), it is her understanding of emotions, as relational and material, that guides this exploration of affect. In this article, I use emotion(ality), affect and feeling interchangeably; these terms serve ‘more like keywords, points of departure for conversation rather than definition’ (Cvetkovich, 2012: 5). Although I acknowledge that affect, emotion and feeling are contested terms in scholarship, I am not particularly interested in defining or parsing out the differences between them, nor do I see the value of isolating them as distinct facets of experience. Rather, I am interested in what emotions ‘do’, and how they help constitute particular forms of agency.

Farah carries her phone on her body at all times, whether at home or when attending activities in the camp. When she speaks about her husband, she touches her phone with her hand, or holds it against her chest. As a wearable (rather than simply portable) device, capable of archiving and sharing affective material (such as text messages, apps, and photos), the physical, digital and emotional infrastructures of the smartphone make it uniquely embodied (Reading, 2009; also Baldassar et al., 2016). In her study of the mediation of waiting within Iraqi refugee households in Jordan, Mirjam A. Twigt (2018) uses the concept of ‘affective affordances’ – the capability of media use to impart affects – to explore the ways ‘mediated attachments enable people to stay optimistic and endure the present, yet hopefully orient themselves toward particular futures’ (p. 2). Affective affordances are exemplified by Farah, whose smartphone not only mediates her relationship with her husband but also hopefully orients her toward feelings of reassurance and the possibility of a ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011; Twigt, 2018) with him in Germany, once their family is reunited. In the meantime, Farah uses the affective affordances of her smartphone to mediate and maintain her family unit. While some scholars have noted the negative implications of mediated co-presence, for example, the potential of increased conflict or social surveillance (Baldassar et al., 2016; Madianou, 2016), among my participants smartphones were significantly oriented towards positive feeling, and, despite their panoptical potential, were viewed as an essential tool for enduring camp life.

Politicising space, time and liminality

Building upon the previous discussion of emotions, this section elaborates on the spatio-temporal positioning of refugees waiting to travel onwards, arguing that the experience of waiting is suffused with emotions. While ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) would have us believe that information and communications technologies (ICTs) are annihilating time and space, I will argue that, on an emotional level, time and space are always affectively felt. Forced migrants are especially aware of the boundaries that keep them separated from loved ones, boundaries which often exist due to forces beyond their control (Leurs, 2016: 30). With this in mind, it is necessary to consider the ways that social differences, such as gender, race, class, religion and immigration status, are imbricated in migrants’ daily lived experiences of time and space (Sharma, 2014; also Massey, 1994). Refugee camps, especially, are not ‘neutral sites of humanitarianism’ (Turner, 2015: 22), but rather, politicised ‘assemblages’ of different ‘social, institutional and diasporic relations and practices’ (Ramadan, 2013: 75). Digital technologies do not collapse these tensions, but rather exacerbate them. For example, in the context of smartphone ownership and the European border regime, the racialised ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008) does not fit the ‘somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004: 8) of a smartphone owner and is perceived as ‘a territorial threat’ (p. 144). This construction is not only racialised but also gendered – embedded in the related binaries of agent/victim and as risk/at risk, in which the unaccompanied, male Muslim agent (invading Europe) is constructed ‘as risk’, while the vulnerable female victim or, more often, a massified ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1990) (sheltered in the camp) is ‘at risk’. Such constructs of invulnerability/vulnerability (which circulate in the media, the humanitarian sector and among policymakers) communicate that there are ‘specific categories of people in whom vulnerability inheres’ and imply that there are invulnerable Others who should be feared. By fixing people in gendered categories that promote, rather than prevent, their distortion, these binaries work to erase her agency and his vulnerability (Cohn, 2014: 62).

However, exclusion is not only experienced in spatial terms. As Sarah Sharma (2014) argues, ‘Immigration status is itself based on a set of spatial exclusions and restrictions, but they are temporally experienced’ (p. 145). For example, while refugees await resettlement, they may live without ‘forms of temporal maintenance, such as health care’ (p. 145), education or legal employment, all of which allow refugees to advance, or at the very least, sustain their lives. Yet, in migration studies, displacement is often described in spatial terms (e.g. migration journeys). When temporality is considered, the concept of liminality is often applied, where liminality represents a temporal passage ‘betwixt and between’ flight and so-called durable solutions – repatriation, integration or resettlement (Twigt, 2018: 2). However, critical scholars (e.g. Brun, 2016; Griffiths, 2014; Malkki, 1995) have problematised such framings of liminality, which, according to Georgina Ramsay (2017), imply a linearity of experience and characterise the refugee ‘as a particular category of experience, rather than as a person with a history, a present, and an imagined future that are shaped through personalized experiences’ (p. 535; also Brun, 2016). I would add that invoking the liminal implicitly negates the present. For example, Adam Ramadan (2013) proposes refugee status as an ‘embodiment’ of liminality, ‘not a normal life to be lived but an enduring struggle for survival and return to a time and place of meaning’ (p. 73). While a refugee’s life is indeed a precarious life (Butler, 2006), such a focus on liminality, if left unscrutinised, may preclude agency. If the past and future are ‘meaning’-ful, is the present then meaningless? Such a negation of the present cannot serve refugees, whose experiences of waiting are happening now, are ongoing and are affectively felt. At the same time, it is often the case that refugees, themselves, characterise their own experience as ‘stuck’ (Griffiths, 2014), ‘waiting’ (Twigt, 2018) or ‘in transit’ (El-Shaarawi, 2015). This begs the question: How do we honour the ways refugees describe their own experiences in time and space, while also problematising uncritical invocations of the liminal that serve to universalise refugee displacement as a linear experience, rather than as personalised, agentive and filled with struggle? I do not claim to have an answer to this question; rather, I offer it as an invitation for further deliberation. In the next section, I will elaborate on my understanding of waiting and explain how refugees ‘make do’ with protracted experiences of waiting.

‘Making do’ with protracted experiences of waiting

For refugees stranded in Greece, waiting is a deeply affective experience. However, rather than drawing on liminality, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of impasse, as ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic’ (p. 4). Berlant’s description of impasse resonates with this article’s epigraph, where Rania describes feeling ‘here, but . . . not here’. For Rania, waiting is an affective spatio-temporal experience of (dis)location, (dis)embodiment and (dis)orientation. Waiting is experienced ‘here’ (in the present) as well as ‘not here’ (elsewhere). Waiting is not a passive process; it requires ‘emotive labor’ (Twigt, 2018: 4) and involves struggle. Here, struggle is less about dramatic resistance (though it certainly can be), but rather, the ‘doing of little things’ – the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday – which ‘does not have the sense of a passive submission . . . but of an active engagement’ (Das, 2007: 68). In order to explore this understanding of struggle I use the dialectic of strategy and tactics (De Certeau, 1984; see also Jiwani, 2011), where strategy refers to the disciplinary actions imposed by those who exercise power, and tactics refer to the agentive actions of those who are subjected to power. In the context of migration, strategy is enacted through militarised and mediatised border regimes, as well as the institutionalisation of migrant detention centres and refugee camps. Tactics, meanwhile, are the everyday actions, the doings of little things, that allow refugees to persevere. However, as will become evident in the empirical sections, strategy and tactics are not an either/or – the two are deeply related, and tactics may ‘fail, backfire, or end up constituting that against which they are directed’ (Schielke, 2015: 218). This article is specifically interested in the ways migrants mobilise their phones in order to engage emotive tactics (self-care, hope, creativity) that allow them to ‘make do’ with protracted experiences of displacement. By providing a way for refugee women to live with the ambivalent, contesting emotions produced through protracted experiences of waiting, I argue that mediated practices of ‘making do’ constitute particular forms of agency. In the following methodological sections, I will contextualise the (im)material conditions of the refugee camp and position myself as a researcher. As will become evident, my methodology is deeply embedded in feminist practices.

Exploring fieldwork contexts

From February 2017 to May 2017, I undertook fieldwork at a semi-permanent,⁵ open refugee camp in mainland Greece. Though residents originally lived in tents on a small section of land, the camp had recently been winterised. Between 650 and 800 residents now lived in 158 numbered isoboxes (converted shipping containers), referred to by residents as ‘caravans’. These isoboxes were assigned by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who acted as official camp management. As an open camp, residents were free to come and go as they pleased, though long absences could result in eviction (so that new residents could move in). However, an open camp also meant that anyone could enter, which posed protection risks, as the camp was unpatrolled and no special permission or clearance was required. In terms of camp organisation, it was difficult to regulate practices and processes among actors when anyone, or any organisation, was allowed in. In addition, as journalists, and even tourists, could enter and take photos as they wished (both of which I saw during my fieldwork), the open camp maintained the gaze, facilitated a “spectatorship of suffering” (Chouliaraki, 2006) and perpetuated disempowering narratives of refugees as vulnerable, victimised Others (Turner, 2015). Yet, despite the drawbacks of an open camp, many residents preferred this to the alternative (a closed camp⁶), asserting, ‘I can choose who I want to talk to’. Had I conducted my fieldwork in a closed camp, my fieldwork would have been different.

At the camp, I volunteered in an NGO’s⁷ women’s space (WS), a private, fenced-in area designated for women and girls aged 12 and above. As a volunteer, I worked alongside the WS coordinator and the gender-based violence protection officer in order to perform outreach to all women at the camp and facilitate mental health and psychosocial support activities. While I am critical of the paternalism invoked by protection programmes, and of the organisation for which I volunteered, I also recognise the importance of community spaces for women, especially in environments that offer little privacy. In addition to the WS, the NGO ran a child-friendly space, which acted as the camp’s primary day care centre, and a youth engagement space. A number of other actors were active in the camp, for example, the Red Cross, which ran a medical clinic, WS and men’s space, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Médecins du Monde and various NGOs that provided art and language classes, ran a community kitchen, supported a community-run library and/or were responsible for distribution of catered food (provided by the military), as well as non-food items (e.g. clothing). In addition, several residents in camp had set up their own shops, for example, a barbershop and a falafel stand – the latter, a popular lunch spot among NGO staff and volunteers. Prior to my arrival, the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR – United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) had maintained a visible presence at the camp; however, following the death of an infant, for which the community blamed UNHCR, the agency had minimised its visibility. In terms of transportation, a bus service coordinated by IOM/UNHCR provided transit for children attending local schools, as well as residents with asylum interviews (based in Athens), or doctor’s appointments, with the remaining seats available on a first-come, first-served basis. Without these buses, the mobility of residents would be extremely limited, as no public buses stopped nearby, and taxis were not only expensive, but some refused to travel to the camp’s remote location.

Although a detailed intersectional analysis goes beyond the scope of this article, I will briefly highlight several ways that camp composition and organisational structure created, or exacerbated, inequalities during my fieldwork. (1) The camp was racially, religiously and ethnically diverse – however, ethnicity was a particularly significant identity marker. Syrian residents, by far the largest population in camp, often self-identified as Syrian Arab or Syrian Kurd. This difference was important to residents and created social, as well as material, divisions. (2) Six Somali women, who did not know one another prior to arriving in Greece, were placed together in an isobox, an assignment based off of their racialisation alone. Despite the fact that they were the only Black women in camp, their isobox had been arbitrarily placed on the camp’s perimeter. (3) Delal (41 years old) suffered a spinal injury during her family’s boat crossing to Greece and required a wheelchair. However, the camp, which was filled in with gravel, was not wheelchair accessible. It was not until she was seriously injured, which for privacy reasons I will not elaborate on, that she and her family were moved to an apartment in Athens. (4) The camp was located along a low-flying military training route, and several times a day, the sound of airplane engines thundered overhead. This sound, which had become a part of the camp’s ambient noise, enacted structural violence on residents, as it reminded many of the sounds of conflict from which they fled. (5) While there was WiFi at the camp, the signal was weak and did not work inside isoboxes, which forced residents to go outside for Internet access. For this reason, many residents opted to purchase monthly data plans (ranging from €5 to €20) using the small monthly allowances provided by the Red Cross, or with their own funds (from savings, remittances or unreported employment). However, these data plans were not sold in camp – residents had to travel to the nearest Greek town, or to Athens, both of which would cost considerable time and money. In each of these examples, inclusion, exclusion and oppression are heterogeneous and interlocking.

‘Why did you come here?’ Reflections on positionality

As a white woman with Canadian–Irish citizenship, the mobility provided by my privileged position stood in stark contrast to the precarity of the residents I interacted with on a daily basis during my fieldwork. A reflexive research process has kept me conscious that ‘however benevolently motivated’ (Mohanty, 1984: 338) my research may be, the knowledge produced through research is always partial and has the potential to enact forms of epistemic and symbolic violence. While recruiting participants, one resident asked me point-blank, ‘Why did you come here?’ – a question which struck me. Although I had written a research proposal that emphasised ethical practice, it was not until this interaction that I understood the importance of situated positioning, which is the aim and benefit of feminist research practice. Power relations and contested identities are always active, unstable and lived, and so they must be continuously recognised and negotiated in the field, which is inevitably messy importantly, humbling (Sultana, 2007: 382). In her discussion of vulnerable writing, Tiffany Page (2017) considers the potential for violence when representing, and attempting to produce (coherent forms of) knowledge from, the lives of others. Page’s notion of vulnerable writing encourages me to disclose the interaction above – a resident’s questioning of my positioning – rather than omit it from this output. I believe that within an affirmative and ethical research design, methodological challenges offer opportunities for reflection and should be recognised as generative parts of the research process, rather than treated as failures. Scholarship that is truly invested in minimising harm must be attentive to the micro- and macro-politics that are inevitably enacted through our work. These tensions play out materially in our fieldwork, but also discursively in our attempts to ‘make sense’ of the experiences of others. For this reason, a significant portion of this methodological section has been dedicated to engaging with questions of power, positionality, knowledge and context. While I understand that acknowledging these issues does not guarantee the production of critical, responsible research, as Farhana Sultana (2007) notes, ‘the alternative of not heeding such issues is even more problematic’ (p. 383). Ethical implications have material consequences, and no research is so path-breaking as to justify exploitation. With this in mind, I am cautious of how I represent the very real women whose time and care made this research possible. In this article, I have aimed to write in a way that is receptive, vulnerable and embodied, in order to think critically and reflexively about how to produce knowledge that is not only attentive to nuance and complexity but also affirms and honours the lives of the women I was privileged to know intimately.

Feminist research design and methods

هي مشان تتم عندك ذكرى ألكسندرا، هي بس انتي بتشوفيها

This is to remain as a souvenir, Alexandra. Only you can look at it.

Given the subject of my research, and the fact that my participants represent only a small sample of a highly heterogeneous community, it would be impossible to quantify their experiences. Thus, in order to foreground lived experience, emotionality and embodiment, I used qualitative research methods. This article focuses on the situated experiences of 15 particular women (see Table 1). Ethnographic fieldwork consisted of daily participant-observation in personal caravans (with permission), the WS, the camp’s ‘public’ spaces, as well as in-depth interviews, and photo elicitation. ‘Hanging out’ (Rodgers, 2004) with residents, and volunteering with one of the humanitarian actors in the camp, afforded me a deeper understanding of residents’ media use in relation to lived experience, emotionality and embodiment. In-depth interviews followed a semi-structured interview guide, written in English and translated into Arabic, which explained the purpose, aims and goals of my research, and included various questions and prompts relating to smartphone use and emotionality. As I was not fluent in the first languages of camp residents (Arabic, Kurdish, Somali), I mainly recruited participants whom I knew spoke English well. Thus, interviews were conducted mostly in English, with some exceptions. For example, in my interview with Farah, I shared my Arabic interview guide with her and had our conversation translated into English. With Wardah (35 years old), I used text-to-speech (TTS) software, as she was semi-literate. Interviews were conducted one-to-one or in small groups, either in participants’ caravans or in the WS. When needed, friends or family acted as informal translators. All participants consented to interviews and to being audio-recorded. In the case of minors, parents or guardians were present to provide consent. Interviews were entirely voluntary, and participants were free to withdraw participation at any time. In all cases, anonymity was protected through the use of pseudonyms (either self-selected or assigned). Interviews were transcribed verbatim, in English or in Arabic, and coded inductively using qualitative data analysis software. In order to safeguard my participants’ data, all recordings and transcripts were saved in a password-protected folder in my laptop.

Table 1.

Details of the participants.

Pseudonym	Age (years)	Ethnicity (self-identified)	Time in Greece
Amina	19	Syrian Kurd	14 months
Anood	16	Syrian Kurd	12 months
Awaz	20	Iraqi Kurd	10 months
Delal	41	Iraqi Kurd	10 months
Dino	15	Syrian Kurd	Unknown
Farah	27	Syrian Kurd	14 months
Fatima	29	Syrian Arab	13 months
Hayat	17	Syrian Kurd	14 months
Lulu	27	Syrian Kurd	8 months
Nadia	23	Syrian Arab	13 months
Rania	24	Syrian Arab	Unknown
Rozhin	19	Iraqi Kurd	10 months
Wardah	35	Somali	13 months
Yara	10	Iraqi Kurd	10 months
Zara	16	Syrian Kurd	14 months

Interviews included a photo elicitation exercise, structured around W5H questions (who, what, when, where, why, how), during which participants were invited to share their social media profiles and digital content including images, videos and posts. While the use of photographs was initially only one aspect of my methodology, images became central to my data collection and the lived practice of reflexive and vulnerable research. Photo elicitation provided an opening for participants to guide the interview and speak more candidly about emotions. I, too, shared personal photographs and the stories connected to them. By doing so, I put myself in a position of vulnerability, where my images were subjected to participants’ scrutiny, interpretation and, possibly, judgement. However, this vulnerability also created a sense of ‘shared intimacy’ (Moreno Figueroa, 2008: 68) between me and my participants, which, in turn, fostered more trusting relations. It is important to note that, although private personal photographs were shared with me, I was not always given permission to photograph or reproduce these images. For example, when Farah shared a selfie of her and her husband in Athens, she told me, ‘This is to remain as a souvenir, Alexandra. Only you can look at it’. Even in the case of images given to me with consent – in order to safeguard my participants’ data, and out of respect for the personal information shared during interviews – I have been cautious about which I reproduce in this article. For this reason, I consider the images that appear here as not only re-presentations of participants’ photographs but also documentations of intimate research encounters.

In the following empirical sections, I will explore three examples of ‘making do’: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care; mediated family practices as a tactic of hope; and nature photography as a tactic of creativity.

‘Making do’: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care

For refugees stranded in Greece, waiting is a deeply affective and embodied experience. During my interview with Rania, I learned that her parents remain in Syria. When I asked her whether she followed the news in order to stay updated on events back home, her answer surprised me:

Uhh, not really . . . If I always follow the news, uh maybe I will be crazy. Because uh everyday, many people kill, die and uh ‘bomb bomb’ everywhere. So always I will be nervous and uh thinking. So I have to be more strong, because you know I’m woman here alone and with child. If I uh be so nervous, it’s not good for my baby and uh maybe I can uh I can’t uh do my uh what I have to do in right way.

Yet, I had not considered that the news could be such a source of distress, as most research on migrant news consumption characterises migrants as ‘news-hungry’ (Christiansen, 2004). I had even expected the people I encountered at camp to be politically active – an assumption that I had unknowingly carried with me into the field – when for the most part, they were just trying to survive. However, far from an act of passivity, Rania’s practice of not following the news demonstrated agency. Whereas news from the mass media made Rania feel ‘crazy’ or ‘nervous’, news that she got ‘from the people’, meaning directly from her personal network, helped Rania ‘to be more strong’ for her child – a sentiment that was also expressed by other participants with young children. Scholars have argued that in all countries, especially in conflict-affected countries, politics are fought out in the news. As news media is never neutral, personal relationships play an important (if not central) role in news-gathering practices (Gillespie et al., 2016), whether it be because friends and family are considered more trustworthy (Karim and Al-Rawi, 2018), or because it is more pragmatic. For example, for Wardah, who is semi-literate, reading news online is not a realistic option: ‘Websites . . . I don’t understand’. Instead, she relies on getting her news through word-of-mouth, either over the phone or from people in camp. Nevertheless, there are drawbacks to such practices of filtering. For example, the news shared by personal networks is partial and selective; there is always a risk that important information may not be shared although, as noted earlier, there are also biases among mainstream news networks. Despite these drawbacks, participants considered their loved ones’ representations of the news to be the most reliable, those one best suited to their needs.

Finally, just as the personal is political, the emotional is material. Feelings, whether positive or negative, impact individual abilities to perform everyday actions, which Rania implies when she says, ‘If I . . . be so nervous . . . I can’t . . . do . . . what I have to do in right way’. Indeed, emotions matter – they shape the surfaces of bodies, as well as worlds (Ahmed, 2014). Not only must Rania, and the other women in this study, live with the pain of separation, they must also negotiate the everyday realities of having friends, family and a home (country) in persistent danger, all the while negotiating their own protracted experiences of displacement and uncertainties about what will happen to them and/or their loved ones. Although Rania is concerned about her family’s safety in Syria, she recognises that self-care – caring for one’s health and wellbeing – is necessary in order for her to persist (Lorde, 2017: 130) and support her son. Rather than feel utterly defeated by her circumstances, Rania chooses to ‘make do’ on her terms. In the context of a dehumanising border regime, Rania’s non-mainstream news consumption, as a tactic of self-care, demonstrates agency. In the next section, I will further explore the importance of emotions in negotiating protracted experiences of displacement and family separation.

‘Making do’: mediated family practices as a tactic of hope

For refugees stranded in Greece, waiting is a deeply affective and mediated experience. Lulu (27 years old) is a Syrian Kurd from Hasakah, in north-eastern Syria. She has been in Greece for 8 months, with her son, sister-in-law and nephew. In Syria, she studied Arabic ‘in university, but I . . . didn’t complete, because “dom dom”’, imitating the sounds of bombs. When the war intensified, Lulu (then pregnant) fled Syria with her husband. Lulu remained in Greece, while her husband travelled onwards to Germany. Since then, Lulu has given birth to their son, who her husband has not yet met in person – their entire relationship has been mediated through Lulu’s and her husband’s respective smartphones. Every day, she sends him photos and videos of their son through WhatsApp – each phone call, picture and video only increases their desire to be together. Yet, for refugee families like Lulu and her husband, poor Internet connections, audio and image lags, dropped calls and frozen screens are ubiquitous, and the everyday digital practice of ‘doing family’ can best be characterised as a life of waiting. Despite the affective affordances of their smartphones, digital co-presence remains a substitute for physical co-presence (Baldassar et al., 2016: 137–138), and living apart is affectively experienced. Whether it involves waiting for the outcome of their reunification application, waiting for a scheduled voice call or waiting for WhatsApp’s single grey checkmark (message successfully sent) to double into two grey checkmarks (message successfully delivered to the recipient’s phone) and, finally, into two blue checkmarks (the recipient has read your message), there is always an anxiety stirred by waiting for news or information (from loved ones), and there are always (micro) wait times within, and further compounded by, these moments of waiting. These examples of technologically incorporated waiting underscore the ways in which waiting is mediated, multiple, personal and situated.

To compensate for these feelings, Lulu and her husband orient themselves towards the future. During our interview, Lulu describes how she comes to know her husband’s city through the selfies he takes. She showed me pictures of her husband in front of his language school, the university (where they both hope to study), and various city landmarks. Not only are the images curated by her husband but the images themselves are imbued with good feeling, since Lulu is happy to receive photos from him. However, Lulu’s future expectations extend beyond these images: ‘Yesterday, I said my husband: “If I come to Germany, I will complete my study, and uh after that I will – baby. Another baby, haha”’. Lulu’s aspirations for the future are embedded in a fantasy of the ‘good life’, characterised by family, security and social upward mobility (Berlant, 2011). Scholars argue that such fantasies of the ‘good life’ offer refugees a source of inspiration and hope, and make precarious conditions more bearable (Twigt, 2018: 8). Indeed, for Lulu, hope is a ‘generative action’ (Brun, 2016: 394) – working towards an idea(l) of the ‘good life’ offers a form of creative mobility that hopefully orients her towards the future.

However, as Berlant (2011) argues, the fantasy of the ‘good life’ can be a source of ‘cruel optimism’, that is, ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (p. 1). The desire to be resettled in Europe – the outcome desired by all my participants – is an example of cruel optimism, because resettlement will not necessarily resolve the ‘problem’ of their displacement. The immigration regime extends beyond refugee camps, from legal and cultural notions of citizenship to child welfare systems. Unfortunately, many refugees only discover after resettlement that displacement is neither liminal nor linear. Take the case of Farah’s resettlement as an example. In October 2017, I visited Farah and her family in their new home in Germany. Farah waited over a year to be reunited with her husband – in camp, her smartphone’s affective affordances mediated and maintained her family unit and kept her hopeful for the future. As soon as possible, she had wanted to resume their life together, a new life, a better life, a ‘good life’. Yet, her life in Germany has not been better, or easier, than her life was in Greece, and the ‘problem’ of her displacement has certainly not been resolved. While she, her husband and her children no longer endure the pain of separation, in the small town in east Germany where they have been resettled their neighbours are unwelcoming, and there are limited resources and opportunities available to them. The fact that Farah has been resettled and yet still lives precariously highlights the insidiousness of the immigration regime and emphasises why it is necessary to move beyond framing the displacement of refugees as a liminal condition. While there is nothing inherently wrong with fantasy – in Lulu’s case, fantasy provides a form of creative mobility that allows her to endure her present conditions – it is necessary to identify its shortcomings. As a fantasy, the ‘good life’ that is aspired to by some (such as Farah) may not (ever) be achieved. Sometimes the fantasy of the ‘good life’ is only that – a fantasy. This section has shown how mediated family practices, facilitated through the smartphone’s affective affordances, allow refugees like Lulu and her husband to ‘make do’ while living apart and remain hopeful about the future, while also drawing into question whether or not that future will transpire as desired. In the next empirical section, I will further explore the potential of creative mobilities.

‘Making do’: nature photography as a tactic of creativity

Building upon the previous two cases of ‘making do’, this final empirical section uses nature photography and the smartphone’s affective affordances to explore how living in waiting is a deeply affective, embodied and mediated experience. During the photo elicitation exercise, I invited participants to share a ‘favourite photo’ from their smartphone’s image archive. Among the most popular were photographs of nature. These images were selected for various reasons, such as for their aesthetic qualities, or for the memories attached to them. For Lulu, a photo of the sunset (Figure 1) is her favourite, ‘because I see it’s very –beautiful’. Lulu likes the way the light changes as the sun goes down, noting ‘This colour, I like –I love this’. However, the photo is also special to her for another reason: when she shared it with her husband, he made it his WhatsApp profile picture. Lulu laughs when she tells me this, as though to downplay it, but she also lights up, and I can see that this small action on his part is not insignificant to her. In this way, the smartphone’s affective affordances for taking, saving, retrieving and sharing photos contribute to ‘an archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich, 2003) within the phone itself. Lulu’s photo of the sunset is a favourite not only because of its aesthetic qualities but also because the photo was shared with, and affirmed by, her husband.

Figure 1.

Photo of the sunset.

For Rozhin, a 19-year-old woman from Kurdistan, a photo of the sky (Figure 2) is her favourite. Rozhin captured this image shortly after she and her family arrived on the Greek islands:

Rozhin:

In Chios, we are waiting for the bus. And I look the sky and take the picture.

Alexandra:

How do you feel when you look at it?

Rozhin:

I’m mostly just like uh – fly. Just like flying, fly in the sky – like free. I don’t know, make me happy, the sky make me happy.

Figure 2.

Photo of the sky between trees.

This photo is certainly important to Rozhin because of the time and space in which it was captured – the image celebrates her and her family’s safe passage across the Aegean. However, it is more than this. As a subject, the sky is a borderless space of fantasy, freedom and flight. In our conversations, Rozhin and her sister Aawaz (20 years old) often expressed dismay over their idleness in camp. In Kurdistan, they had busy social lives, but in camp, the absence of interesting activities, close friends and a clear future forward made them feel ‘stuck’ (Brun, 2016). Ann Cvetkovich (2012) argues that, when confronted with feelings of stuckedness, creativity can encompass ‘different ways of being able to move: to solve problems, have ideas, be joyful about the present, make things’ (p. 21). For Rozhin, nature photography offers such forms of agency.

Since leaving the refugee camp, I have maintained contact with several participants, including Rozhin. Many of the youth I interviewed are active on social media and have since added me on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. I have noticed that these young women frequently share photos and videos of the natural environment on their social media accounts. Participants share videos where they walk through quiet areas of camp, or film landscapes through the closed windows of moving vehicles. It is common for traditional Arabic or Kurdish music to accompany these nature videos, which are typically shared on Snapchat or in Instagram stories, disappearing after 24 hours. In her study of the mediation of hope, Twigt (2018) observes, ‘Being considered “out of place” further pushes the Iraqi refugees to orient themselves beyond the virtual: to other physical places where futures are deemed possible. The virtual is used to conceive these other physical places’ (p. 7). Despite their transience, the videos shared by my participants feel like creative engagements with such spaces. Especially when paired with musical accompaniment, the videos feel like more than encapsulations of a fleeting present – they feel as though they are part of something material and enduring. By mobilising the affective affordances of their smartphones in order to capture, archive and share images, participants affectively orient themselves elsewhere. While displacement involves an uprooting of spatio-temporal positioning, this final empirical section has used nature photography to show how creativity offers a way to ‘make do’ with this unsettling.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how waiting is a deeply affective and embodied experience, mediated by smartphones, and tempered both spatially and temporally. Using a reflexive and vulnerable methodology, this article has drawn upon the particular, situated and contested experiences of 15 women waiting in a refugee camp in Greece, in order to make three interventions. First, this article has sought to affirm refugee women’s voices and experiences as valuable sites of knowledge production. Second, this article has questioned prevalent discourses that represent displacement as a liminal condition. It has done so by politicising refugee temporalities, particularly the negation of the present, and by problematising resettlement as a solution to displacement. Third, this article has conceptualised the way that strategy and tactics figure into the everyday lives of refugees. It has done so by arguing that mediated practices of ‘making do’, understood in this article as emotive, everyday, spatio-temporal tactics, constitute particular forms of agency, which provide ways for refugee women to live with the ambivalent, contesting emotions produced through protracted experiences of waiting. This article has explored three mobilities, or tactics, that mobilise the smartphone’s affective affordances and may be engaged while waiting: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care; mediated family practices as a tactic of hope; and nature photography as a tactic of creativity. It is important to note that, while these tactics allow women like Rania, Lulu and Rozhin to ‘make do’ with their experience of displacement, there are limitations to such tactical interventions (e.g. the case of Farah), and experiences of displacement are always personal and differentiated. For this reason, these tactics were never presented as solutions to displacement, but rather as specific practices which allow particular women to endure, and move within, particular conditions of precarity. The emotive tactics of ‘making do’ explored in this article serve as forms of agency within a dehumanising strategy of migration control and, as such, offer an important intervention in the regime of waiting. While the mediated mobilities offered by self-care, hope and creativity may not be as mappable as migration journeys, I have argued that they are valid and meaningful forms of movement that deserve greater attention, engagement and study within migration scholarship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to the women she met during her fieldwork in Greece, especially her participants, whose participation, trust and tremendous generosity made this research possible. This article benefitted from comments received at the 15th EASA biennial conference, ‘Staying, Moving, Settling’ held from 14 to 17 August 2018 at Stockholm University, and the ECREA conference, ‘Diaspora, Migration, and the Media’ held on 2 and 3 November 2017 at University of the Basque Country. Finally, she is grateful to Koen Leurs, Jamila Mascat, the themed issue editors and four anonymous reviewers whose critical but constructive remarks helped improve this article. Any shortcomings or errors remain her own.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alexandra Greene

Notes

Biographical note

Alexandra Greene is a feminist researcher with a background in gender, media and migration. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

References

Ahmed

(2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd edn). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Baldassar

Nedelcu

Merla

et al. (2016) ICT-based co-presence in transnational families and communities: Challenging the premise of face-to-face proximity in sustaining relationships. Global Networks 16(2): 133–144.

Berlant

(2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brun

(2016) There is no future in humanitarianism: Emergency, temporality and protracted displacement. History and Anthropology 27(4): 393–410.

Butler

(2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books.

Chouliaraki

(2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage Publications.

Chouliaraki

(2017) Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news. Popular Communication 15(2): 78–94.

Christiansen

(2004) News media consumption among immigrants in Europe: The relevance of diaspora. Ethnicities 4(2): 185–207.

Cohn

(2014) ‘Maternal thinking’ and the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in security paradigms, policies, and practices. Journal of International Political Theory 10: 46–69.

10.

Cvetkovich

(2003) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

11.

Cvetkovich

(2012) Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

12.

Das

(2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

13.

De Certeau

(1984) ‘Making do’: Uses and tactics. In: De Certeau

(ed.) The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Rendall

). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp.29–42.

14.

Diminescu

(2008) The connected migrant: An epistemological manifesto. Social Science Information 47: 565–579.

15.

El-Shaarawi

(2015) Living an uncertain future: Temporality, uncertainty, and well-being among Iraqi refugees in Egypt. Social Analysis 59(1): 38–56.

16.

Enloe

(1990) Women and children: Making feminist sense of the Persian Gulf crisis. The Village Voice, 25 September.

17.

Gillespie

Ampofo

Cheesman

et al. (2016) Mapping refugee media journeys: Smartphones and social media networks. Report, The Open University/France Médias Monde. Available at: https://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/sites/www.open.ac.uk.ccig/files/Mapping%20Refugee%20Media%20Journeys%2016%20May%20FIN%20MG_0.pdf

18.

Griffiths

MBE

(2014) Out of time: The temporal uncertainties of refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(12): 1991–2009.

19.

Harvey

(1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

20.

Jiwani

(2011) Pedagogies of hope: Counter narratives and anti-disciplinary tactics. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33(4): 333–353.

21.

Karim

Al-Rawi

(2018) Diaspora and Media in Europe: Migration, Identity, and Integration. Berlin: Springer.

22.

Leurs

(2016) Young connected migrants and non-normative European family life: Exploring affective human right claims of young e-diasporas. International Journal of E-Politics 7(3): 15–34.

23.

Lorde

(2017) A Burst of Light: And Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Courier Dover Publications.

24.

Madianou

(2016) Polymedia communication among transnational families: What are the long-term consequences for migration? In: Kilkey

Palenga-Möllenbeck

(eds) Family Life in an Age of Migration and Mobility: Global Perspectives through the Life Course. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.71–93.

25.

Malkki

(1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

26.

Massey

(1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

27.

Mohanty

(1984) Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary 12–13(3–1): 333–358.

28.

Moreno Figueroa

(2008) Looking emotionally: Photography, racism and intimacy in research. History of the Human Sciences 21(4): 68–85.

29.

Nedelcu

Wyss

(2016) ‘Doing family’ through ICT-mediated ordinary co-presence: Transnational communication practices of Romanian migrants in Switzerland. Global Networks 16(2): 202–218.

30.

Page

(2017) Vulnerable writing as a feminist methodological practice. Feminist Review 115(1): 13–29.

31.

Pink

Horst

Postill

et al. (2015) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage.

32.

Puwar

(2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg.

33.

Ramadan

(2013) Spatialising the refugee camp. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(1): 65–77.

34.

Ramsay

(2017) Incommensurable futures and displaced lives: Sovereignty as control over time. Public Culture 29(3): 515–538.

35.

Reading

(2009) Memobilia: The mobile phone and the emergence of wearable memories. In: Garde-Hansen

Hoskins

Reading

(eds) Save As . . . Digital Memories. Berlin: Springer, pp.81–95.

36.

Rodgers

(2004) Hanging out with forced migrants methodological and ethical challenges. Forced Migration Review 21: 48–49.

37.

Schielke

(2015) Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

38.

Sharma

(2014) In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

39.

Sultana

(2007) Reflexivity, positionality and participatory ethics: Negotiating fieldwork dilemmas in international research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3): 374–385.

40.

Turner

(2015) On encampment and gendered vulnerabilities: A critical analysis of the UK’s vulnerable persons relocation scheme for Syrian refugees. Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration 5: 21–25.

41.

Twigt

(2018) The mediation of hope: Digital technologies and affective affordances within Iraqi refugee households in Jordan. Social Media + Society 4(1): 1–14.

42.

Wetherell

(2015) Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique. Body & Society 21: 139–166.

43.

Witteborn

(2014) Forced migrants, emotive practice and digital heterotopia. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 5(1): 73–85.

44.

Zijlstra

Liempt

(2017) Smart(phone) travelling: Understanding the use and impact of mobile technology on irregular migration journeys. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 3(2–3): 174–191.