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Internet access, place and belonging in the British asylum system
New Media & Society
Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that digital technologies are a part of everyday life. However, the UK Home Office does not consider communication or transport to be ‘essential needs’ for people seeking asylum. One Gigabyte of mobile data can cost up to 10% of weekly asylum support payments and a single bus ticket another 10%. By asking who can move and connect, this article explores the relationship between digital and physical spaces among people seeking asylum. Drawing on an ethnographic study, it argues that access to the Internet can facilitate a sense of belonging in physical and digital space. This, however, is constrained by “real-world” power relations, the consumer orientation of web design and the physical exclusions of the asylum system. The article concludes that digital exclusion, its intersections with physical exclusions as well as race, class and legal status have been brought into even sharper relief by COVID-19.
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This editorial introduces the theoretical framework, methodological approach and comparative themes of the Special Issue on ‘Somali Diaspora and Digital Practices: Gender, Media and Belonging’. The Special Issue proposes to connect the notion of the Somali diaspora to recent advancements in communication technologies, exploring the ways in which the Somali, specifically Somali women, keep in touch locally, nationally and transnationally through different forms of everyday digital practices. In particular for Somali migrant women, the use of digital media is highly embedded in their gendered roles as mothers, daughters, reunited wives, students and professionals, who keep the ties with the homeland and diaspora communities in diversified as well as collective ways. The close analysis of empirical findings across different sites in Europe shows multi-sitedness, generation and urban belonging as central features. These issues emerge as findings from a large ethnographic fieldwork carried out across European cities (Amsterdam, London and Rome). Ethnography offers an essential contribution in understanding social media practices as situated in specific social, geographical and political contexts, taking into account the intersectional dynamic of factors including gender, race, ethnicity, generation, religion and sexual orientation.
This paper argues that Internet access should be recognised as a human right because it has become practically indispensable for having adequate opportunities to realise our socio-economic human rights. This argument is significant for a philosophically informed public understanding of the Internet and because it provides the basis for creating new duties. For instance, accepting a human right to Internet access minimally requires guaranteeing access for everyone and protecting Internet access and use from certain objectionable interferences (e.g. surveillance, censorship, online abuse). Realising this right thus requires creating an Internet that is crucially different from the one we currently have. The argument thus has wide-ranging implications.
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many activities online. However, there is little research on the digital inclusion of undocumented immigrants and their experience of the pandemic in the United States. We conducted 32 interviews with undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States to examine how digital technologies mediated their experiences of the pandemic. We find that undocumented immigrants (1) face barriers to telehealth services, (2) are at high risk of COVID-19 misinformation, (3) experience difficulties in assessing privacy risks, and (4) experienced heterogeneous outcomes of technology use during the pandemic. Our analysis shows that digital technologies both supported and further marginalized undocumented immigrants during the pandemic. Future research on the digital inclusion of vulnerable populations should pay particular attention to the interaction between their underlying vulnerabilities, on one hand, and attitudes, uses, and outcomes associated with technology, on the other.
This article examines social media as a site for identity negotiation and community building among Roma in the Czech Republic. As Roma are continually denied authority over the construction of their identities, their Czech-ness, claim to physical spaces, and generally made to feel that they do not belong—both in the material and symbolic sense—this article examines how individual activists and community organizers utilize media as a resource to combat spatial alienation. This ethnographic study pays close attention to the cultivation of community through Facebook groups, the utilization of groups and event pages to organize, and the affordances and challenges of moving online efforts offline. At the same time, this article explores tensions and contradictions of these digital spaces that may involve issues like the lack of resources and the fragmentation of community—and of communal space—by such variables as age, language, and technological access and literacy. Ultimately, this article suggests that social media may embody both emotional and material places manifesting as additional/alternative places to negotiate identities and belonging for Roma in the Czech Republic. The findings of this research carry important implications for those with complicated relationships to home(lands), including geographically displaced people.
This article investigates the entanglement between socioeconomic and technological factors in conditioning people's patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and different methods of analysis, such as factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and logit analysis, this study shows how techno-social variables have a stronger effect than socioeconomic variables in explaining the advanced use of the Internet.
The task of this article is to outline foundations of a Marxist-humanist approach to communication justice, media justice, and digital justice. A dialectical approach to justice is outlined that differs from idealist monism, dualism, and pluralism. It conceives of injustice as alienation and inhumanity and justice as humanism. This approach is applied to communication, media, and the digital. The article outlines concepts and dimensions of (in)justice in general, communication (in)justice, media (in)justice, and digital (in)justice.
This study investigates the issue of digital exclusion resulting from the digitisation of government and council services within the UK. An initial analysis of customer support log data from a council in a large UK city helped identify the most commonly queried services and modes of support. The main findings are based on qualitative analysis of ten interviews, structured around the results from the log analysis, conducted with front-line staff members at the central library of the same council. The study identifies a range of issues associated with the provision of e-government services and the subsequent under-utilisation by the public, including poor design, issues with effective access and the level of digital literacy among end users. The study also proposes the concept of the 'digital carer', a friend or family member who is relied upon by users unable to interact with e-government services themselves. The findings of this study have implications for the way in which these services are designed and delivered and point to the need for further work that can contribute to the UK digital economy by facilitating better access to e-government services and reduce digital exclusion, especially for elderly and marginalised users.
This article explores the everyday lives of young former refugees in small Norwegian towns and considers how a focus on "doing belonging" can help us understand the processes of place attachment and social inclusion/exclusion in a time of increasing diversity and social division. By looking at these youths' everyday activities and social networks using a range of participatory methods, this article describes how former refugee youths actively work to create and maintain a sense of belonging. The study shows that the youths simultaneously draw on shared knowledge from their social networks and on embodied knowledge gained through the habitual use of place to perform belonging. It is argued that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body interacting with people and place, matters; other crucial aspects are freedom to move and experience the materiality of place, and that former refugees' belonging needs to be understood as relating to other people’s understandings of their right to belong. The study shows that particular structural conditions for doing belonging should be considered by policy makers.
This paper explores how asylum might be understood from an urban perspective. The paper focuses on a range of conceptual interventions mobilized around the notion of ‘seeing like a city’, which foreground the pragmatic and compositional nature of urban politics. These debates are placed in conversation with discussions over the changing nature of relations of power, to examine the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that current research on dispersal has tended to focus too exclusively on the regulatory and sovereign aspects of this policy. In doing so, such research has overlooked the urban manifestation of dispersal as a process that has created new knowledges and forms of expertise, whilst being sustained through spatially complex relations of present authority and distant accountability. In exploring these relations, the paper argues that a focus on ‘refugee urbanism’ may open productive new avenues for critically exploring urban asylum.
This article links the personal use/meaning of information and communications technology for refugees and asylum seekers with their visibility/invisibility in public spaces. More precisely, it gives insights into how the personal and public spheres of asylum seeking interrelate when discussing connectivity. In doing so, I discuss the following research questions: How is connectivity embedded in refugees and asylum seekers’ everyday practices? And in addition, in which ways does this personal dimension interact with the public (structural level), given their increased presence in public spaces? In order to respond to the research questions, a qualitative-ethnographic approach was chosen for this study by adopting different research methods: Participatory observations, semi-structured interviews, expert interviews, and document analysis. Such an approach is fundamental to avoid a media-centric analysis without accounting for offline contextual lives, power relations, and experiences. As the results show the meaning of connectivity within the asylum experience raises a public as well as a personal dimension. As such the meaning of the Internet is based on the agency of asylum seekers given restricted access to public spaces and social support offline. Thus, the results reveal that both Internet access and experiences of transnationalism/displacement constitute and configure connectivity. Following this line of argument, connectivity widely compensates for the spaces of action, spaces of learning, spaces of interaction, and spaces for information that are missing offline, in the process of emplacing themselves in a new environment.
This article develops a Digital Capital Index by adopting the definition provided by Ragnedda, who defines Digital Capital as the accumulation of digital competencies and digital technologies, and the model for measuring it developed by Ragnedda and Ruiu. It aims to develop a measure that can be replicated for comparison in different contexts. This article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the literature by (a) consolidating the concept of Digital Capital as a specific capital and (b) empirically measuring it. A Digital Capital Index is developed through an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and validated with a representative sample survey of 868 UK citizens. The validation procedure shows that the Digital Capital Index is associated with socioeconomic and sociodemographic patterns, such as age, income, educational level and place of residence, while it appears not to be related to gender.
In this article, we advance current discussions by bringing together debates about digital play and digital labour. We consider everyday life entanglements of mobile media and digital work and play at home. To develop this argument, we analyse the embodied and affective dimensions of mundane everyday life at home with digital media through the concepts of atmosphere and ambient play. We argue that attention to how digital play is implicated in the constitution of texture and feeling of the everyday needs to underpin our understanding of how mobile media are participating in shifts in everyday experiences of work and home. In doing so, we draw on ethnographic research undertaken with middle-class families in Melbourne, Australia.
While aerial photography is associated with vertical objectivity and spatial abstractions, street-level imagery appears less political in its orientation to the particularities of place. I contest this assumption, showing how the aggregation of street-level imagery into “big datasets” allows for the algorithmic sorting of places by their street-level visual qualities. This occurs through an abstraction by “datafication,” inscribing new power geometries onto urban places through algorithmic linkages between visual environmental qualities, geographic information, and valuations of social worth and risk. Though largely missing from media studies of Google Street View, similar issues have been raised in critiques of criminological theories that use place as a proxy for risk. Comparing the Broken Windows theory of criminogenesis with big data applications of street-level imagery informs a critical media studies approach to Google Street View. The final section of this article suggests alternative theoretical orientations for algorithm design that avoid the pitfalls of essentialist equations of place with social character.
This special section assembles perspectives on mobilities, migration and new media that emphasise mobile subjects’ multifarious involvements in overlapping digital spheres, which relate them socially and emotionally to both their home and destination countries. In this introduction, we identify two key themes that connect articles in this collection. First, authors accentuate migration and new media appropriation as a process involving liminal spaces characterized by transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Second, they analyse the subtle frictions that derive from migrants’ embeddedness in digital and offline social fields, shot through with power asymmetries that may simultaneously imply empowerment on one hand, and surveillance and control on the other. Authors draw on empirical case studies of transnational migration in foregrounding multiple mobilities within, to or from Asia.
This article examines the differences that digital media (Internet and mobile communications) and mobility create for sense of place. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 German professionals in Singapore, it analyses digital media choices and use during the relocation and settlement process in the destination of migration and the effect of these practices on migrants’ perception of place. It demonstrates how the primary reason to use digital media conversed from individual interests and needs in relation to the relocation and/or initial exploration of the city to the social and emotional ramifications of their use the longer the interviewees stayed in Singapore. It makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of how digital and offline places combine in the construction of sense of place, how the digital sphere affects engagements with place, attachment to it and sensuous experiences of it.
Drawing from ethnographic research of expatriates who use meetup.com and similar digitally based social organizing platforms to access events in Paris, this paper explores how on- and offline meet-up rhetoric and routines contribute to the production of a mobile “sense of place” for people who have relocated or traveled alone. By highlighting how participants may use digital media to create a sense of belonging to an “international community” extendable across a series of local places, this research diverges from earlier studies that have focused on how migrants use media to maintain connections to a “homeland” or to reconstitute the home abroad. Although the paper celebrates new agencies afforded by mobile place-making, particularly for women, I suggest that as professional labor trends increasingly assert the value of placeless-ness, tools that combine communication with location-based digital organizing will only grow in importance and the “support” provided by them should be continually interrogated.
The lives of transnational groups and individuals are marked by a spatial and imaginary split: a phenomenon wherein identity, belonging and representation have become increasingly elusive concepts, and the realm of the ‘cultural’ vastly important. And, the theoretical compasses of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are particularly relevant and illuminating in considering social space, mediated communication and belonging in relation to urban diasporic communities and gendered subjectivities. The aim of this paper is to address expressions of identity and belonging at the intersection of online communicative practice and offline spatial formations, with a focus on the specificities of gendered constructions of sociality and subjectivity in the diaspora.
Race and racism persist online in ways that are both new and unique to the Internet, alongside vestiges of centuries-old forms that reverberate significantly both offline and on. As we mark 15 years into the field of Internet studies, it becomes necessary to assess what the extant research tells us about race and racism. This paper provides an analysis of the literature on race and racism in Internet studies in the broad areas of (1) race and the structure of the Internet, (2) race and racism matters in what we do online, and (3) race, social control and Internet law. Then, drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, including Hall’s spectacle of the Other and DuBois’s view of white culture, the paper offers an analysis and critique of the field, in particular the use of racial formation theory. Finally, the paper points to the need for a critical understanding of whiteness in Internet studies.
Contemporary research on disparities in access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) – what is commonly referred to as the digital divide – is limited in terms of its ability to explain the interrelationships between digital and urban inequalities. Drawing upon critical geographical conceptualizations of the relationships between power, place, and scale, and a Bourdieusian conceptualization of technological and social capital, this article proposes a model of the interconnections between urban and digital inequalities from the vantage point of the everyday experiences of economically marginalized urban residents in the United States. On the basis of this model, the author suggests a future research agenda that examines the empowerment or disempowerment of people related to ICTs in relation to their own frameworks for ICT use; how technological capacity is related to technological and social capital embedded in particular places; and how technical capacity is developed across multiple spaces and multiple arenas situated in a broader analysis of inequality.
Belonging is a notion both vaguely defined and ill-theorized. Scholars in various social disciplines often take this notion for granted, as if its meaning is somewhat self-explanatory. Others tend to equate it with the notion of identity, citizenship, or both. By relying on a critical reading of an extensive literature across academic disciplines, this study aims to offer an analytical framework for the study of belonging. I argue that belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging). The risk of focusing only on one of these two dimensions is to fall in the trap of either a socially de-contextualized individualism or an all-encompassing social(izing) discourse. The open question is whether the increasing cultural and ethnic diversification of contemporary societies can lead to the formation of communities of belonging beyond communities of identity.
The United Nations has suggested that access to the Internet is a human right. In this paper, I defend the U.N.’s position against a number of challenges. First, I show that Vinton Cerf’s recent rejection of the human right to the Internet is based on a misunderstanding of the nature and structure of human rights. Second, I argue that the Internet enables the right to communicate, which is a linchpin right, and, thus, states have a duty to see to it that citizens have access to Internet technology. Third, I argue that concerns that the Internet can be used to engage in oppression and imperialism do not show that there is not a human right to it. Rather, it shows that the right to the Internet must be understood as part of a larger system of human rights.
This article analyses the digital governmentality of the city of refuge. It shows how digital infrastructures support refugees’ new life in the European city, while also normalizing the conditionality of their recognition as humans and as citizens-in-the-making. Research in Athens, Berlin, and London revealed the city as a vital but fierce space for refugees to claim, and sometimes find recognition that the nation often denies. A multimethod qualitative study with refugees and civil society actors at the aftermath of Europe’s “migration crisis” recorded urban cultures of hope for cities that are hospitable and open. Yet, it also recorded conditional welcoming that sets strict requirements for newcomers’ recognition as more than a category of external Others that need to prove their “right to have rights.” As shown, a digital order requires a performed refugeeness as precondition for recognition: that is, a swift move from abject vulnerability to resilient individualism.
This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group, investigating the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and providing an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems. It is the first book to seek to understand how asylum seekers experience the dispersal system and the impact this has on their lives. The author argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals, challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until receipt of refugee status and illustrates how they create their own sense of 'belonging' in the absence of official recognition. Academics, students, policy-makers and practitioners would all benefit from reading this book.
Networked technologies are a key tool for today’s refugees; not only on the move but also upon arrival in their new surroundings. Where mobile Internet access is affordable and infrastructures are stable, as in Europe’s metropoles, refugees can use smartphones to cope with everyday challenges. The paper presents findings from a qualitative interview study with Syrian refugees who recently settled in Vienna, Austria. The study implemented a three-fold methodology, combining face-to-face interviews, WhatsApp chats, and participant research. Results are presented from a localized appropriation notion (the act of making use of local specific media environment when drawing a media technology into one’s life) identifying practices in the contexts of: place-making and geographical orientation; information access and self-help; language learning and translation; and ‘doing family’. Hence, refugees are both emotionally attached to and technically dependent on their devices. The article concludes that smartphones hold an untapped potential for integration processes.
This paper reports on an exploratory, qualitative study of media use among Syrian refugees in Turkey, focusing on two locations: a refugee camp in Sanliurfa (South-Eastern Turkey) and a community center in Istanbul. It seeks to provide new angles for conceptualizing the “connected refugee” by adopting a non-media-centric and ethnographic approach that emphasizes diversity, local contexts and everydayness. Firstly, the paper discusses the interplay between individual and collective ownership of media and ICTs, which is linked to certain power dynamics and an informal economy of solidarity. Secondly, the role of popular media (e.g., music, television series, football) for establishing ontological security in an interstitial and unstable position is discussed.
The rapid proliferation and ongoing transformation of digital technologies and social media platforms have had a substantial influence on the participatory cultures of young people and their associated social connections. This social/digital nexus raises important questions of social cohesion, with digital technologies at once augmenting social interaction whilst simultaneously creating an uneven landscape of access for participation. To address this interface of the digital and the social, this paper presents a qualitative study of 24 tertiary students from ethnic minority backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand, who use social media. Incorporating a pre-screening questionnaire, a one-week social media diary and semi-structured interviews, this study presents the ways in which digital belongings influence participants' practices of friendship and family. The ways that connective media influence, and even constrain interaction alongside the politics of belongings, are theorised to further examine the meanings and experiences behind participants' social media usage and social contact. By integrating these ideas, this paper presents the ways in which young university students use social media and the extent to which digital interaction and networking influence social participation and social cohesion.
In this groundbreaking book, Nira Yuval-Davis provides a cutting-edge investigation of the challenging debates around belonging and the politics of belonging. Alongside the hegemonic forms of citizenship and nationalism which have tended to dominate our recent political and social history, the author examines alternative contemporary political projects of belonging constructed around the notions of religion, cosmopolitanism, and the feminist ‘ethics of care’. The book also explores the effects of globalization, mass migration, the rise of both fundamentalist and human rights movements on such politics of belonging, as well as some of its racialized and gendered dimensions. A special space is given to the various feminist political movements that have been engaged as part of or in resistance to the political projects of belonging.
This study examines the ways in which transnational city newcomers interact with locative technology to build knowledge about their urban surroundings. We conducted semistructured interviews with 25 transnational migrants recently relocated to the greater New York City area, investigating their day-to-day smartphone use, navigation tactics, and uses of location-based services. Our analysis reflects on three themes: tensions surrounding different navigation strategies (searching vs. browsing); social monitoring practices (awareness vs. surveillance); and perceptions of online information sources (credibility/trust vs. distrust). Together, these themes highlight the contradictory outcomes of technology use both facilitating and hindering the processes of urban learning. We conclude with a discussion of paradoxical outcomes of technological use as a means of unpacking the sociotechnical tensions that emerge from locative technology use among transnational migrants in new urban environments.
This article argues that studying everyday life is valuable because it makes sociologists attend to the routine and temporal aspects of social life. The ‘everyday’ brings the seasons of society into view. It also brings to the fore how liveable lives are made in the midst of the social damage produced by widening class divisions. Drawing lessons from Erving Goffman’s sociology, the article argues that attending to everyday life necessitates developing an eye for detail and attentiveness to the seemingly unimportant. It is also argued that central to the study of everyday life is the relationship between history, culture, class and biography. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of a working-class estate in Croydon, south London where residents light up their home at Christmas in ‘chromatic surplus’.
Mobility is often portrayed as the antithesis of belonging. In this article, we challenge this perspective investigating how mobility and motility influence belonging in everyday life. We develop a perspective on belonging consisting of the dimensions of mobility, people and place and conditioned by the underlying dimensions of time, resources and structures of meaning. Applying this to interview material from a case study in Aalborg, we propose a tentative typology of mobile forms of belonging. It is discussed how different rhythms, conditions of mobility and variations in mobility resources result in different scales of belonging and modes of ‘centering’.
This article considers a proposed human right of Internet access. Internet access, with its range of political, economic,
social and cultural uses, is essential for contemporary living. States are also committed to ensuring the Internet’s universality,
integrity and openness. General international law and international human rights law are examined for the existence and scope
of a possible right. Internet access is currently a feature of several pre-existing rights, particularly the right to freedom
of expression. Does Internet access warrant separate recognition? This article considers whether content should be restricted,
and consent a prerequisite; whether payment is necessary; and whether certain individuals should be denied access. A right
of Internet access must be balanced against other rights and competing interests including privacy, intellectual property
protection and ensuring public order. Limitations or restrictions on access are permissible and disconnection is allowed for
specific users provided prior procedural safeguards are met.
Using a political economic approach to communication, this paper critiques the Google company by examining Google Maps and Google Earth. Academic, media and daily lives discourses tend to ask three questions about Google. First, what other services does Google provide in addition to a search engine? Second, is Google an unconventional company? Third, does Google provide free information? By examining the development of Google Maps and Google Earth from an historical perspective, and by situating technological development in a broader socioeconomic context, the paper argues that Google employs a wide array of strategies to stay competitive in the information industry.
This article presents a study that measures the degree of digital exclusion—or, conversely, the degree of digital inclusion—in Hong Kong, a developed city in East Asia. Governments in the region are among the most active in the developed world in pushing ahead in developing knowledge economies and information societies. The major concern is to improve/maintain their competitiveness in the new knowledge economy created by the process of globalization and the advancement in information technology. Many countries in the region have established themselves in the top ranks of a number of indexes and measurements comparing digital readiness, digital access, information and communication technology penetration, and others. However, not all the citizens in the region share the benefits and promises of the information society. People who are traditionally disadvantaged, such as the elderly and those on a low income, are further excluded from the information society. Such exclusion affects other social groups as well. This study creates a new digital inclusion index to measures the degree of inclusion of various disadvantaged groups in an information society. Data regarding seven disadvantaged groups were collected through a household survey (N = 2,312). The index captures information about access, knowledge, usage, and affordability ininformation and communication technology of the disadvantaged in comparison with mainstream society (N = 284).
Written evidence submitted by
- C Fuchs
- M Michalis
Communications and digital committee
- House Of Lords
UK digital poverty evidence review 2022
- K Allmann
The digital leisure divide and the forcibly displaced
- J Warnes
- E Iglesias
- P Arora
Going without: Deepening poverty in the UK
- K Schmueceker
- P Matejic
- M Bestwick
Supporting Digital Engagement: Final Report to Sheffield City Council
- S Yates
- J Kirby
- E Lockley