Digital Media and Migration: Reflections from the Southern Margins of Europe

Abstract

This chapter aims to untangle the relationship between digital media practices and marginality in one of the geographical and discursive peripheries of Southern Europe, Italy, in particular in the city of Rome. Its intention is to disrupt the myth of Europe by exploring the epistemological and methodological limitations of the field of digital media at the crossroads with migration studies from this position of marginality, by taking into account the digital practices of Somali and Turkish migrant women living in Rome. Indeed, a Southern European focus might help to engage critically with North-Western European migration and digital media scholarship, as the product of unequal power relations articulated between the centre and its peripheries. This is to deconstruct universalizing theories and concepts of digital media and migration based on North-Western European and North American perspectives but also revive this interdisciplinary field by reading social phenomena that are grounded in specific empirical realities, which are situated and localized. Hence, in this chapter this epistemological map is turned upside down, showing what a Southern look can offer to the digital migration studies canon, both theoretically and empirically.