Abstract
The book Diasporas and Media in Europe: Migration, Identity and Integration provides a thorough exploration of the communicative practices of migrants and their descendants who reside in different European countries. While geographical mobility is recognised as a human constant, the book focuses on interesting case studies that provide insights into how recent technological developments interact with the connections of diasporic populations in Europe.
The book starts with a theoretical introduction written by one of its editors and is followed by seven empirical case-studies by different scholars. In this introductory chapter, Karim H. Karim situates the book eloquently in relation to European cultural politics and introduces the importance of ‘globalisation-from-below’. He links the ongoing tendency to think of diasporas as anomalies (p. 2) to normative and performative fantasies around Europe’s supposedly homogeneous and sedentary host population. Between the European country of residence and country of origin, the ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) comes into being: the creative zone in which the migrant navigates being-neither-here-nor-there (p. 10). This results in the co-existence of a ‘multiplicity of cultural cartographies’ (p. 10); having ‘plural allegiances’ (p. 11) to different places, peoples and ideas is, contrary to what modernist binary thinking presumes, far from mutually exclusive, as also becomes clear in the empirical case-studies that follow.
In Chapter 2, Koen Leurs draws upon an impressive array of research conducted among diasporic or diverse youth – Dutch-Moroccans, young Londoners from diverse backgrounds and Somalis in Ethiopia, to critically engage with ‘methodological Europeanism’ (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013), both from within and outside of Europe’s geographical borders. He shows how encapsulation – the turn towards fellow diasporic members – and cosmopolitanism – reaching out across cultural differences – tend to go together in everyday digital practices and how these mediated practices interact with perceptions and experiences around (for instance) racism, Islamophobia, and normative scripts. ICTs not only enable the youth in this study to find different ways to actively engage in response to exclusionary processes: Leurs points out that the digital also has significance in living with differences.
Chapter 3 by Michelle Timmermans engages with a migrant population whose homeland continues to be in turmoil. The Syrian migrants in her study in Sweden are avid and critical media-users, in particular regarding news from Syria. However, Timmermans rightfully argues that looking solely at migrants’ online media habits to gauge one’s integration into a receiving country would be inadequate: most of her respondents were determined to integrate in Sweden and in this regard they were engaged in many offline activities with their host population.
Chapter 4, which is written by co-editor Ahmad Al-Rawi and Shahira Al-Fahmy, on a Syrian community in Italy, is particularly noteworthy for its approach. Its innovative analytical methods – consisting of quantitative and qualitative exploration of images and text posted on a Facebook page – provide an important addition to the field of migration-and-media studies that has hitherto largely drawn upon qualitative research methods. The research outcomes give additional insights into how ongoing activism regarding Syria and affective attachments to Italy co-exist and can even reinforce each other – for instance, the ways in which being in Europe provides more freedom to express oneself than is the case in Assad-controlled Syria.
Chapter 5 by Roya Imani Giglou, Leen d’Haenens and Christine Ogan consists of a study on attitudes and attachments of people with a Turkish background in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany in response to the Gezi Protests, therefore enabling a cross-border perspective. This study provides interesting insights regarding the socio-cultural changes in response to social movements and how diasporic relations are dynamic (p. 103): transnational connections – and the flow of news and information – feed back into and influence the engagement of people in Turkey, and the readings of political developments in Turkey are in turn influenced by the different migration policies within people’s respective countries of residence.
Cecilia Gordona-Peile (Chapter 6) considers how Ecuadorian and Moroccan migrants living in economic crisis-affected Spain engage in transnational family connections. The chapter draws upon fieldwork conducted in 2011–2012; while more recent technological developments might have reduced particular limitations the migrants faced in relation to access and affordability, Gordano-Peile’s contribution proves to be very valuable. She makes the convincing argument that the ‘spatio-temporal’ dimensions of communication, which are extensity, intensity, velocity and impact (Held et al., 1999; further developed by Ros, 2010), enable us to further comprehend how migrants ‘juggle’ with and respond to the processes and affects that transnational family connections bring about through the use and affordances of different technologies.
Chapter 7 by Inês Branco examines how a relatively small – and understudied – diasporic Nepalese population engages with media within the receiving country of Portugal. Branco points out that migrants media-use might change in accordance with one’s language skills and with how integrated the migrants in this study feel in Portugal. The chapter further considers how national TV-programming teaches migrants how to act and perform in a way similar to the Portuguese home population.
The final chapter (Chapter 8) by Madly Simba Moumba considers how Congolese youth in Belgium uses social network sites (SNSs) to negotiate societal and parental demands. In particular, humour and transnational ‘events’ are meaningful, as they resonate with people’s personal experiences – for instance, in relation to one’s physical appearance or cultural background – and foster feelings of a shared community.
Valuably, the book deploys a comparative and transnational approach; it aims to go beyond the narrow focus on the national that studies on multiculturalism tend to reproduce (p. 13). Karim points out that Europe as a singular, white and Christian continent is an imaginary construct which negates significant segments of its own history. However, the socio-historical backgrounds of the migrants in this book and their media-use prior to arriving to Europe receive relatively little attention. It can therefore easily be misread as reinstating Europe as a unified and hyper-connected Global Northern geography in contrast to a disconnected Global South. Moreover, as also becomes evident in Leurs’ contribution, Europe’s ideological and material borders stretch out far beyond its geographical location.
In his introduction, Karim makes the argument that multiculturalism ought to be considered for its potential to engage with global realities (p. 13). Ideas around multiculturalism might have created space to challenge ideas around ethnocultural homogeneity. Yet the policies of many European countries around multiculturalism have also been rightfully critiqued for their reification of culture and their ongoing, often racialised construction of migrants as rights-conditional ‘intolerable subjects’ (Lentin and Titley, 2012) who need to continuously prove their loyalty (Yuval-Davis, 2012). Karim does make mention of the ‘ongoing systematic discrimination’ and the necessity of ‘hard work’ (p. 12) but throughout the book, with the exception of Leurs’ contribution, the structural conditions that non-white migrants especially must navigate are somewhat overshadowed. Some empirical chapters seem to foreground integration as a choice that migrants make (therefore, also potentially blaming them for their ‘failure’ to integrate) without the necessary critique of Europe’s host populations and their exclusionary policies. Given its focus on migration and integration in Europe, the book would have benefitted from a more thorough critical engagement with the order and control that European countries tend to impose on their migrant populations.
What is particularly interesting about this book is that it came into being through co-editor Ahmed Al-Rawi’s interactions with postgraduate students. I am very sympathetic to this cross-linkage between pedagogy, engagement with young scholars and academic writing. The different studies in this book provide important insights into how different methodologies can be deployed to study the phenomenon of diasporic media-use, and enable us to further comprehend how, in migrants’ lives, technologies provide the abilities to engage in different forms of globalisation-from-below. These technologies enable connections to people elsewhere, as well as between people with similar backgrounds; to sustain or forge socio-cultural or political attachments to their native country or to more distant homelands; to engage in acts of digital citizenship and to ‘do family’. It is important to remember, however, that these tactics are often in response to or despite Europe’s geographical borders and its exclusionary policies within.
Interview with co-editor, Karim H. Karim
Your excellent book The Media of Diaspora: Mapping the globe (Karim, 2003) was one of the first studies that recognised how diasporic mediascapes were entangled with the ‘intense, cutting-edge creativity born out of existential angst of the migrant who is neither here nor there’ (p. 5). Could you reflect – in line with rapid technological developments and social, political and economic changes – on what you believe has changed in regard to migrant’s mediated practices since 2003. What do you feel has remained similar, even if it is perhaps articulated differently?
The Media of Diaspora: Mapping the globe was a pioneering book as the study of migration and communication was just emerging at the time of publication. A key difference between now and that time is the substantial advancement of digital communication technologies. The various Internet-based platforms and the increasing sophistication of telephonic communications have substantially changed the quality and quantity of diasporic interactions. It is important to recognise, however, that one can easily slip into a technologically deterministic interpretation of communications of migrants and their descendants. As I write in my introductory chapter in Diaspora and Media in Europe, the innate diasporic desire to communicate – which of course is a very human tendency – leads people to seek out the most efficient and cost-effective means to stay in touch with family and friends across borders and seas. This human desire remains constant over time.
You and your co-editor Ahmed Al-Rawi dedicate the book to people working to improve the lives of displaced people, and several of the book chapters consider the mediated practices of people who felt forced to leave countries in response to conflict. Most often, the reasons behind any kind of migration are often multi-causal and multi-layered (Lindley, 2010), and labels that differentiate between economic and forced migration tend to be appropriated as governing tools. But do you think that factors like the involuntary nature of outward migration, the forced separation of loved ones, prolonged bureaucratic uncertainty around one’s refugee status and the ongoing unrest in one’s home country contribute to particularly different mediated practices of forced diasporic populations?
The specific situations in which migrants find themselves determine the ways in which they conduct their communications. Koen Leurs and Cecilia Gordano Peile’s chapters, for example, help us understand the ways in which the financial constraints of people make them dependent on their interlocutors in another country to bear the costs of Skype or telephone calls. The often-prolonged processing of asylum-seeking applications drains the finances of migrants and their families. Inaccessibility of certain kinds of media as one is fleeing one’s country, which may be in a state of war, shapes what communications means one is forced to depend on. Such constraints also determines how frequently (or if) one is able to contact one’s family and friends.
Why did you and your co-editor in particular focus on migrants geographically located in Europe?
My previous book on the topic, The Media of Diaspora: Mapping the globe, conducted a global mapping of diasporic communication covering six continents. This was well-received and the publication is still widely used as a general reference on the topic. Ahmed Al-Rawi, my fellow co-editor for the current publication, initiated this new project and suggested that we work on it together. During his previous work at Erasmus University, he had supervised several students who were doing original research on diasporic communications in Europe. Several chapters in Diaspora and Media in Europe were developed from these projects. A couple of my former students had contributed work to The Media of Diaspora: Mapping the globe, and I have found that some of the most original and insightful work on the use of new media comes from young scholars. Whereas different parts of the world are experiencing challenges with respect to the communications of migrants, the specific study of European case studies provides an understanding of the particular issues that have become very topical due to the substantial immigration that this continent is experiencing. One of the reasons that I felt that I should devote my intellectual energy and time to this book was that I felt that the current discussion on European migration is a vitally important one. As I write in my chapter, the transcontinental circulation of people has been an incontrovertible truth of human development for millennia. Canada (to which I myself moved some four decades ago from Kenya, a former British colony) has received immigrants from Europe for 500 years. However, many European countries have difficulty seeing themselves in the context of global migration. The historical reality is that there have been varying levels of emigration and immigration from all parts of Europe for many centuries and the current situation is part of the story of humanity.
Avtar Brah’s (1996) concept of diaspora space points to the confluence of social, economic, cultural and psychological processes, which is shaped and inhabited not only by diasporic communities, but equally so by those who have ‘stayed put’ (p. 16). What role do you feel that host populations have in regard to the integration of migrants? What (positive) role can media play in this?
Before I answer this important question, please allow me to comment on a common term that is used in the context of migration, namely, ‘host’. I find this word deeply problematic because it sets up a binary relationship, which slides into the notion of an essentialist and permanent difference between long-time residents and their descendants, on one hand, and migrants and their descendants, on the other. There is a history in Europe to view migrants and their progeny as ‘guest workers’ (gastarbeiter) not as fellow citizens. (I am astonished that even some broad-minded European scholars tend to refer to them as ‘foreigners’.) The implication is that the ‘guests’ will be leaving the ‘host’ country, of which they will never be accepted as a part. Therefore, instead of ‘host’ country or population, I suggest the use of the word ‘receiving’ society or population or a country of settlement. Now, to come to your question: the process of integration is a two-way street. The settlement of migrants in a new society becomes extremely difficult when the receiving population puts up barriers to integration, often without realising that it is doing so. Migrants have to work hard to become part of their new home, but it is the role of the receiving population to recognise the social, economic, cultural and psychological barriers to integration and to endeavour with newcomers to overcome them. This is an arduous but necessary process for societal harmony and is ultimately enormously beneficial for everyone when all the citizens of a country are optimally productive. The media certainly have an important role to play in facilitating integration. At the minimum, media workers have to understand how their institutional practices may be impeding the harmonious settlement of migrants by use of harmful narratives and images. Media can also facilitate integration by providing more information specifically aimed at helping newcomers become familiar with the receiving society and also in assisting long-time residents appreciate their own ability to help in this societal endeavour.
As the book chapter by Al-Rawi and Fahmi shows, diasporas are far from always homogeneous; they describe how in Italy different Syrian communities with different political affiliations have come to exist. Does the concept of diaspora leave space for differences-within? Can a focus on diasporas also invoke a cultural and/or racialised otherness of (descendants of) migrants? And how can scholarship such as your book contribute to a deconstruction of migrants, as Madly Simba Boumba (in her chapter on Congolese youth in Brussels – citing Said (1995)) put it, as ‘eternal others’?
Al-Rawi and Fahmi’s, as well as Giglou, d’Haenens and Ogan’s chapter demonstrate how political differences within diasporas are expressed and how people are mobilised in terms of varying viewpoints. I am using these specific chapters as readings in my course on Diaspora and Communication so that, among other things, students understand clearly that diasporas are not monolithic. As in any other human population, one cannot expect all members of a particular social category to have the same opinions. The study of diasporas is important in order that we understand the particular social phenomena related to them; but it is vitally important that the category of diaspora is not essentialised in terms of culture, ‘race’, gender, class and so on. Even the concept of ethnicity as a defining characteristic of a diaspora has to be approached contextually. There are wide ranges of differences within diasporas that have to be recognised and taken into account in scholarly studies. Madly Simba Boumba’s chapter underlines the problems of racism faced by some diasporas in particular, and it also shows how culturally innovative discourses can be used to produce counternarratives through digital media.
This last question follows the previous one. I was wondering whether you could reflect on how diaspora media are (increasingly?) also appropriated for control and surveillance purposes, for instance by governments of home countries (see for instance Moss, (2018)), within the diaspora, and finally by European governments, who use access to smartphone data to verify the narratives of asylum seekers.
Digital media are double-edged swords that provide means of expression as well as the vulnerability to surveillance. However, the underlying tendencies on the part of the governments of the countries of origin and settlement to monitor migrants are not new. They have long sought to control diasporic populations. Several home country administrations have sought to influence emigrant groups politically through ethnic media in receiving countries. On the other side, the immigration, police and intelligence agencies of many receiving societies have attempted to monitor newcomers. Contemporary communication technologies have provided new tools for surveillance. It is important for diasporic individuals to be aware of such governmental practices and to adopt safeguards in their particular media uses. Advocacy groups can also prevent or limit surveillance and seek redress by appealing to communication rights under the laws of their specific countries of settlement and those of the European Union.