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Smartphones as personal digital archives? Recentring migrant authority as curating and storytelling subjects

Bibliographic Data

ID7477477
AuthorsMyria Georgiou (0000-0001-8771-8469, Department of Media and Communications, LSE, UK, corresponding author), Koen Leurs (0000-0003-4765-6464, Utrecht University)
Year2022
Volume23
Issue3
Pages668-689
Publication date2022-02-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-8849 • E-ISSN: 1741-3001
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14648849211060629
OpenAlexW4212916417
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited44

This article addresses the smartphone as a complicated technology of forced migration: a device that accompanies those who move, but which also records and catalogues digital traces within life contexts of conflict, uprooting, migration and resettlement. We conceptualise smartphones as personal digital archives: migrants’ curation of their own stories on their own portable devices. Personal digital archives, we argue, reflect the migrant gaze and constitute mobile subaltern subjects’ record of forced migration. Inductively learning from fieldwork conducted across five sites over 5 years, we analyse how the personal digital archive records and reflects the mediation of migration in its three dimensions: symbolic, affective and material. By focussing on personal digital archives, we recentre the authority of migrants as witnessing subjects of their own life stories. Their archives as autonomous migrant records provide a powerful basis to reflect upon and potentially contest mainstream western journalism cultures, which too often reduce migration to a spectacle and the migrant to a dehistoricised figure with little agency or voice

Agency (philosophy · Art · CONTEST · Digital Storytelling · Internet privacy · Literature · Mainstream · Media studies · Mediation · Narrative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Storytelling · Subaltern · Visual arts · Computer Science · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Media Studies and Communication · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media · History · Law

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Unique citing works26
Citations per year6,5
Citation span2022 - 2026 (5)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 25
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