Saskia Witteborn
Biographic Data
| ID | 131876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saskia Witteborn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saskia |
| FAMILY NAME | Witteborn |
| SIGNATURE | WITTEBORN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1764-7022 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Ethnography and artificial intelligence
This article explores the ethnographic principle of contextualized meaning-making across traditional, digital, and artificial intelligence-based ethnographies. It approaches context from the perspective of language and social interaction, demonstrating how context is constituted through language and communicative practices in embodied, digital, and computational settings. The review addresses the challenges of defining context, emphasizing its dy…
Web3 and deep play
The article argues for the sociocultural contextualization of Web3 affordances by examining play-to-earn gaming in the Philippines. It first outlines how socioeconomic factors promote blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Against this background, and based on scholarship in cultural communication, anthropology, and critical platform studies, the article illustrates how sociocultural frames shape the interpretation and enactment of blockchain-…
Feeling good
Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film’s immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the scrip…
Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication
Digitalization, digitization, and datafication—referred to as the three Ds transforming forced migration management—are composed of practices of abstraction which constitute socio-spatial processes and the imaginary supporting these processes. Against the backdrop of migration management initiatives in Germany and in the European Union, the article highlights how practices like data sharing and predictive modeling create a space of abstraction wh…
Digital placemaking and the datafication of forced migrants
The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced migration. The literature has demonstrated that displaced people engage in digital placemaking to create belonging and to actualize aspirations. Simultaneously, state and suprastate actors expand digital data practices, which construct forced migrants as categories in digital place, thereby configuring their access to physical locations and to socio-le…
The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration
Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingl…
Gendering Cyberspace
Digital Placemaking
This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. As populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense …
Privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement
The paper explores privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement. It makes a case against technocentric and universalizing definitions of privacy by exploring its relational and contextual dimensions, including cultural expectations and the political and economic conditions of seeking asylum. In particular, this paper discusses how displaced women seeking asylum in Germany employed the practice of hiding (e.g., physical movement and the use of di…
Data Privacy and Displacement
Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture …
The digital gift and aspirational mobility
This article discusses aspirational mobility and the digital gift in the context of forced migration in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It illustrates how gifting a mobile device and data enhances the aspirational mobility of forced migrants and intervenes into political codes, which promote social and technological isolation. Through the example of fieldwork with forced migrants and social media analysis, the article shows how participa…
The digital force in forced migration
This article illustrates through two case studies how gendered practices structure imagined affordances of technologies. Using the example of two women seeking asylum in Germany, the article shows how the women engaged with the affordances of visibility and sociality and how institutionalized living associated with the asylum bureaucracy and gendered logics reinforced by that system shaped the women’s engagement. The women used creative tactics t…
Becoming (Im)Perceptible
Extant research has discussed visibility and the affordances of new technologies for the strategic self-representation of migrants. This study introduces becoming as a way of understanding how forced migrants manoeuvre their lives under conditions of physical and social arrest. Becoming is a process through which people shift between different moments and ways of being and relating while responding to historical, sociopolitical and economic reali…
Forced migrants, emotive practice and digital heterotopia
Despite being caught in cycles of waiting and being arrested in institutionalized accommodations, forced migrants engage increasingly in digital border crossings. While the study of digital practice has attracted much scholarly interest, the role of emotions in processes of migration and digital connecting has been neglected. This article explores the role of emotions in the structuring of and engagement with digital heterotopias. Field research …
Confucianism in the Chinese media
This paper explores the relationship between revolutionary history television dramas and the social context in which these dramas are televised in China with In Those Passionate Days serving as an example. Specifically, the paper focuses on the construction of the hero in the drama and the ways in which audiences' interpretations of the drama are indicative of a contemporary revival of Confucian values and practices in Chinese society. The audien…
Testimonio and Spaces of Risk
Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be marginalized in physical and discursive spaces, especially in times that are orchestrated as socially, politically, financially and environmentally risky. This article explores the interrelationship between genre and social space from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and how refugees and asylum seekers in the USA, Germany and Hong Kong exposed spaces of risk through testimonio (testimonio is a…
Constructing the Forced Migrant and the Politics of Space and Place-making
Mobility is one of the defining concepts of globalization processes. For some migrants, however, mobility is restricted by international and national laws as well as sociopolitical discourses, which regulate the migrant body and her ability to create social relations. Based on interviews in asylum seeker accommodations in Germany, this study illustrates how asylum seekers are spatially constructed and arrested through bureaucratic labeling and as…
Discursive Grouping in a Virtual Forum
This paper engages with the notion of intercultural dialogue by exploring how participants in a virtual forum constructed difference and whether this difference fostered or prevented dialogue. The questions in this paper are grounded in dialogue scholarship which regards difference as an opportunity for dialogic transformation. The analysis illustrates that interlocutors mostly confirmed group locations through identity terms, truth talk, and dis…
The role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices
This paper engages with the concept of Global Citizenship and the role of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in teaching awareness about global issues like health, education, and poverty. Specifically, the paper traces the logics of one transnational NGO, Save the Children, as it teaches communication practices and values related to children's rights in developing countries. The paper illustrates how the NGO promotes Global Citiz…
Grouping Processes in a Public Meeting from an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective
This article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis approach, the analysis focuses on ways of place-making and relating as well as enactments of social and racial identities to make empirically grounded claims about grouping processes during the public meeting in question. For most audience members, living in the neighborhood and local knowledge of crime, …
Identity Mobilization Practices of Refugees
This study illustrates the narrative construction of diasporic refugee identities in times of sociopolitical tensions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with how Iraqi refugees living in the United States constituted their identities through narrating in times of the War in Iraq. Gergen's social constructionist approach towards narrating and current theorizing in diaspora studies build the theoretical bases for the analysis. Narratives were c…
The Situated Expression of Arab Collective Identities in the United States
This qualitative inquiry explores how self-identified Arabs living in the United States express their collective identities in talk. Twenty-one participant observations, 50 interviews, and 4 group discussions were conducted with first- and second-generation Arabs of Druze, Muslim, and Christian faiths. Identity labels were identified as a means of communication for expressing collective identities. The participants in this study identified themse…
The Expression of Palestinian Identity in Narratives About Personal Experiences
In this essay, I explore narratives about personal experiences as communicative means that create social reality and community. Carbaugh's (2005) Carbaugh, D. 2005. Cultures in conversation., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Google Scholar] approach to cultural conversations and Koven's (2002) Koven, M. 2002. An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience.. Journal of Pragmatics, 34: 167–217. [Crossref], [We…
Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11
This article examines the impact of September 11, 2001 on the communal identity enactment of 5 Arab women. The Communication Theory of Identity is used to explore which identity labels and associated core symbols the women use before and after September 11. Before September 11, the women referred to themselves mainly with their communal identities as Arab, Palestinian, Egyptian, and sometimes Arab American. The main core symbols related to these …
Becoming (Im)Perceptible
Extant research has discussed visibility and the affordances of new technologies for the strategic self-representation of migrants. This study introduces becoming as a way of understanding how forced migrants manoeuvre their lives under conditions of physical and social arrest. Becoming is a process through which people shift between different moments and ways of being and relating while responding to historical, sociopolitical and economic reali…
The digital force in forced migration
This article illustrates through two case studies how gendered practices structure imagined affordances of technologies. Using the example of two women seeking asylum in Germany, the article shows how the women engaged with the affordances of visibility and sociality and how institutionalized living associated with the asylum bureaucracy and gendered logics reinforced by that system shaped the women’s engagement. The women used creative tactics t…
Forced migrants, emotive practice and digital heterotopia
Despite being caught in cycles of waiting and being arrested in institutionalized accommodations, forced migrants engage increasingly in digital border crossings. While the study of digital practice has attracted much scholarly interest, the role of emotions in processes of migration and digital connecting has been neglected. This article explores the role of emotions in the structuring of and engagement with digital heterotopias. Field research …
The Expression of Palestinian Identity in Narratives About Personal Experiences
In this essay, I explore narratives about personal experiences as communicative means that create social reality and community. Carbaugh's (2005) Carbaugh, D. 2005. Cultures in conversation., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Google Scholar] approach to cultural conversations and Koven's (2002) Koven, M. 2002. An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience.. Journal of Pragmatics, 34: 167–217. [Crossref], [We…
Data Privacy and Displacement
Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture …
Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11
This article examines the impact of September 11, 2001 on the communal identity enactment of 5 Arab women. The Communication Theory of Identity is used to explore which identity labels and associated core symbols the women use before and after September 11. Before September 11, the women referred to themselves mainly with their communal identities as Arab, Palestinian, Egyptian, and sometimes Arab American. The main core symbols related to these …
The role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices
This paper engages with the concept of Global Citizenship and the role of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in teaching awareness about global issues like health, education, and poverty. Specifically, the paper traces the logics of one transnational NGO, Save the Children, as it teaches communication practices and values related to children's rights in developing countries. The paper illustrates how the NGO promotes Global Citiz…
Identity Mobilization Practices of Refugees
This study illustrates the narrative construction of diasporic refugee identities in times of sociopolitical tensions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with how Iraqi refugees living in the United States constituted their identities through narrating in times of the War in Iraq. Gergen's social constructionist approach towards narrating and current theorizing in diaspora studies build the theoretical bases for the analysis. Narratives were c…
Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication
Digitalization, digitization, and datafication—referred to as the three Ds transforming forced migration management—are composed of practices of abstraction which constitute socio-spatial processes and the imaginary supporting these processes. Against the backdrop of migration management initiatives in Germany and in the European Union, the article highlights how practices like data sharing and predictive modeling create a space of abstraction wh…
The digital gift and aspirational mobility
This article discusses aspirational mobility and the digital gift in the context of forced migration in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It illustrates how gifting a mobile device and data enhances the aspirational mobility of forced migrants and intervenes into political codes, which promote social and technological isolation. Through the example of fieldwork with forced migrants and social media analysis, the article shows how participa…
Privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement
The paper explores privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement. It makes a case against technocentric and universalizing definitions of privacy by exploring its relational and contextual dimensions, including cultural expectations and the political and economic conditions of seeking asylum. In particular, this paper discusses how displaced women seeking asylum in Germany employed the practice of hiding (e.g., physical movement and the use of di…
Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11
This article examines the impact of September 11, 2001 on the communal identity enactment of 5 Arab women. The Communication Theory of Identity is used to explore which identity labels and associated core symbols the women use before and after September 11. Before September 11, the women referred to themselves mainly with their communal identities as Arab, Palestinian, Egyptian, and sometimes Arab American. The main core symbols related to these …
The Situated Expression of Arab Collective Identities in the United States
This qualitative inquiry explores how self-identified Arabs living in the United States express their collective identities in talk. Twenty-one participant observations, 50 interviews, and 4 group discussions were conducted with first- and second-generation Arabs of Druze, Muslim, and Christian faiths. Identity labels were identified as a means of communication for expressing collective identities. The participants in this study identified themse…
The Expression of Palestinian Identity in Narratives About Personal Experiences
In this essay, I explore narratives about personal experiences as communicative means that create social reality and community. Carbaugh's (2005) Carbaugh, D. 2005. Cultures in conversation., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Google Scholar] approach to cultural conversations and Koven's (2002) Koven, M. 2002. An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience.. Journal of Pragmatics, 34: 167–217. [Crossref], [We…
Identity Mobilization Practices of Refugees
This study illustrates the narrative construction of diasporic refugee identities in times of sociopolitical tensions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with how Iraqi refugees living in the United States constituted their identities through narrating in times of the War in Iraq. Gergen's social constructionist approach towards narrating and current theorizing in diaspora studies build the theoretical bases for the analysis. Narratives were c…
Grouping Processes in a Public Meeting from an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective
This article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis approach, the analysis focuses on ways of place-making and relating as well as enactments of social and racial identities to make empirically grounded claims about grouping processes during the public meeting in question. For most audience members, living in the neighborhood and local knowledge of crime, …
The role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices
This paper engages with the concept of Global Citizenship and the role of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in teaching awareness about global issues like health, education, and poverty. Specifically, the paper traces the logics of one transnational NGO, Save the Children, as it teaches communication practices and values related to children's rights in developing countries. The paper illustrates how the NGO promotes Global Citiz…
Constructing the Forced Migrant and the Politics of Space and Place-making
Mobility is one of the defining concepts of globalization processes. For some migrants, however, mobility is restricted by international and national laws as well as sociopolitical discourses, which regulate the migrant body and her ability to create social relations. Based on interviews in asylum seeker accommodations in Germany, this study illustrates how asylum seekers are spatially constructed and arrested through bureaucratic labeling and as…
Discursive Grouping in a Virtual Forum
This paper engages with the notion of intercultural dialogue by exploring how participants in a virtual forum constructed difference and whether this difference fostered or prevented dialogue. The questions in this paper are grounded in dialogue scholarship which regards difference as an opportunity for dialogic transformation. The analysis illustrates that interlocutors mostly confirmed group locations through identity terms, truth talk, and dis…
Confucianism in the Chinese media
This paper explores the relationship between revolutionary history television dramas and the social context in which these dramas are televised in China with In Those Passionate Days serving as an example. Specifically, the paper focuses on the construction of the hero in the drama and the ways in which audiences' interpretations of the drama are indicative of a contemporary revival of Confucian values and practices in Chinese society. The audien…
Testimonio and Spaces of Risk
Asylum seekers and refugees tend to be marginalized in physical and discursive spaces, especially in times that are orchestrated as socially, politically, financially and environmentally risky. This article explores the interrelationship between genre and social space from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and how refugees and asylum seekers in the USA, Germany and Hong Kong exposed spaces of risk through testimonio (testimonio is a…
Forced migrants, emotive practice and digital heterotopia
Despite being caught in cycles of waiting and being arrested in institutionalized accommodations, forced migrants engage increasingly in digital border crossings. While the study of digital practice has attracted much scholarly interest, the role of emotions in processes of migration and digital connecting has been neglected. This article explores the role of emotions in the structuring of and engagement with digital heterotopias. Field research …
Becoming (Im)Perceptible
Extant research has discussed visibility and the affordances of new technologies for the strategic self-representation of migrants. This study introduces becoming as a way of understanding how forced migrants manoeuvre their lives under conditions of physical and social arrest. Becoming is a process through which people shift between different moments and ways of being and relating while responding to historical, sociopolitical and economic reali…
The digital force in forced migration
This article illustrates through two case studies how gendered practices structure imagined affordances of technologies. Using the example of two women seeking asylum in Germany, the article shows how the women engaged with the affordances of visibility and sociality and how institutionalized living associated with the asylum bureaucracy and gendered logics reinforced by that system shaped the women’s engagement. The women used creative tactics t…
The digital gift and aspirational mobility
This article discusses aspirational mobility and the digital gift in the context of forced migration in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It illustrates how gifting a mobile device and data enhances the aspirational mobility of forced migrants and intervenes into political codes, which promote social and technological isolation. Through the example of fieldwork with forced migrants and social media analysis, the article shows how participa…
The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration
Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingl…
Gendering Cyberspace
Digital Placemaking
This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. As populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense …
Privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement
The paper explores privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement. It makes a case against technocentric and universalizing definitions of privacy by exploring its relational and contextual dimensions, including cultural expectations and the political and economic conditions of seeking asylum. In particular, this paper discusses how displaced women seeking asylum in Germany employed the practice of hiding (e.g., physical movement and the use of di…
Data Privacy and Displacement
Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture …
Digital placemaking and the datafication of forced migrants
The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced migration. The literature has demonstrated that displaced people engage in digital placemaking to create belonging and to actualize aspirations. Simultaneously, state and suprastate actors expand digital data practices, which construct forced migrants as categories in digital place, thereby configuring their access to physical locations and to socio-le…
Feeling good
Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film’s immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the scrip…
Digitalization, Digitization and Datafication
Digitalization, digitization, and datafication—referred to as the three Ds transforming forced migration management—are composed of practices of abstraction which constitute socio-spatial processes and the imaginary supporting these processes. Against the backdrop of migration management initiatives in Germany and in the European Union, the article highlights how practices like data sharing and predictive modeling create a space of abstraction wh…
Ethnography and artificial intelligence
This article explores the ethnographic principle of contextualized meaning-making across traditional, digital, and artificial intelligence-based ethnographies. It approaches context from the perspective of language and social interaction, demonstrating how context is constituted through language and communicative practices in embodied, digital, and computational settings. The review addresses the challenges of defining context, emphasizing its dy…
Web3 and deep play
The article argues for the sociocultural contextualization of Web3 affordances by examining play-to-earn gaming in the Philippines. It first outlines how socioeconomic factors promote blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Against this background, and based on scholarship in cultural communication, anthropology, and critical platform studies, the article illustrates how sociocultural frames shape the interpretation and enactment of blockchain-…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (8 works) · Refugee (8 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (6 works)