Translocal Modes of Belonging: Diasporic Identity and Digital Media Amongst Migrant Women in London

Abstract

Over the last decade in Britain, dominant media narratives and populist representations have played a significant dual role representing migration as a crisis and reducing migrants’ identities to racialised stereotypes. In response to these representational and discursive exlusions, I take a bottom-up approach by turning attention to how migrant women, as subjects of racialised and gendered marginalisation, use digital technologies for communication, representation, and recognition. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses media studies, urban studies, diaspora studies, and migration studies, and by employing a rich ethnographic approach, I explore how migrant women originally from Turkey, Somalia, and Romania, now living in London, mediate their cultural identities at the intersections of urban and digital spaces. Driven by the voices and the experiences of such migrant women, my thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarly work that examines the relationships between diaspora, migration, and digital media, by further elaborating upon how the interplay of urban and technological dynamics co-constitutes gendered diasporic identities. I argue that migrant women use digital media technologies as resources through which they position themselves and move across different spheres of belonging, simultaneously mediating their identities as urban, national, and transnational entities. Whilst identity and belonging mutually constitute a complex articulation of subjectivity, their actions of (self-) emplacement and mobility within multi-spatial geographies should be understood and contextualised in relation to the micro-politics of everyday life that materialise in the city. In line with this, I suggest that diasporic migrant women’s mediation of cultural identities can be understood through the notion of translocal modes of belonging. This notion recognises how migrant women use digital media to invoke varying alliances, aesthetics, and identity performances for self-positioning and mobility in relation to the structured power geometries that exist within a multi-spatial framework. The intervention I make in this thesis is three-fold. Empirically, I present an intersectional and contextualised account of the relationship between gendered diasporic experiences and digital technology, exploring how the interplay of ethnicity, race, religion, social class, and generation has concrete implications for the situated, everyday life-worlds of migrant women. Methodologically, I adopt a mixed-methods approach by combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies in order to examine diasporic cultural identity production in the context of an online-offline continuum that traverses the intersections between urban and digital spaces. In this context, I demonstrate a methodological trajectory that aims to uncover how this hybrid space—one that encompasses both material and digital streets—becomes reflexive of the gendered, racialised, religious, classed, and generational positions that migrant women adopt. Conceptually, I propose translocational modes of belonging as a means by which to understand how, on urban, national, and transnational scales, the social positionalities of migrant women vary due to shifting, complex power geometries, and how they use digital technologies to develop collective identities and relations of inclusion and exclusion accordingly in a reflexive manner.