Migrancy and Digital Mediations of Emotion

Abstract

This collection brings together key themes that integrate the scholarship on migration, digital media, and emotion. Drawing from a variety of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological traditions that cross-cut academic disciplines, the articles in this issue explore the emotional facets of digitally mediated migrant socialities in a variety of socio-cultural and geographic locales. These examinations raise important questions about how digital media ubiquity shapes global migration experiences and multicultural media publics at various scales. How are relations of intimacy and care at a distance articulated and experienced through social media? What does it mean to imagine home as a digitally mediated experience? In what unexpected ways are platforms reshaping migrant subjectivities? In this introductory article we address these and other questions, outlining how we believe the study of emotion can help us think more comprehensively about the digital mediation of migrants’ social lives in the current media age.