Dana Diminescu's research while affiliated with Télécom ParisTech and other places

Publications (21)

Article
We will present the digital methodological chain and the tools we developed for building the Digital Diasporas Atlas which aims at mapping and analyzing the occupation of digital diasporas by migrant communities. Such a chain is composed of four intertwined steps: 1) equipped web exploration and corpus building; 2) data enrichment (location, langua...
Article
Drawing mainly on the e-Diasporas Atlas project (www.e-diasporas.fr), this article seeks to understand how the web has affected diasporic self-representations. More specifically, by engaging with both media theory and migration studies, it addresses the new modes of boundary formations that arise in the context of migration flows, and how these are...
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Recent empirical studies based on surveys bring evidence that international remittances are more the result of familial intertemporal contracts than self-insurance motivations. Exploiting transaction-level remittance data carried out by 3,294 migrants between 2004 and 2009 in France from a mobile money transfer service to recipients located in Sub-...
Article
This article investigates the matrimonial web of migrants by first focusing on the economy of ethnic profiling which underlies it. Such ethnicization of the ‘love’ encounter is closely dependant on a complex articulation of gender, nationality and mobility (migration), which is called here an ‘international distribution of gender’. Finally, the mig...
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Since the 2005 Barcelona agreement between telephone operators, the procedures whereby migrants transfer money have changed radically, and banks now propose telephone services. By identifying the type of relationship between migrants and addressees, as well as the amounts of the transactions, the authors show that these new procedures have increase...
Article
This article analyses the “migrants’ matrimonial Web” as an original form of ethnic business that equates “doing business” to “networking” (i.e. creating new networks rather than relying on existing ethnic ones). The authors show that it is based on an unusual profiling economy in which profiles (and therefore users) are ethnicized: “networking” =...
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This article deals with uses of the Internet – in particular discussion lists – in the Education Without Borders Network (Réseau Éducation sans Frontières, RESF), a network dedicated to supporting illegal migrants (« sans-papiers »). These uses are closely connected to the kind of activism at work within RESF, a solidarity activism based on sponsor...
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Full-text available
We report here on research aiming to reconstruct urban mobilities and communication practices through mobile phone base data. We have developed a software probe that can be implemented on a user's mobile phone, and which allows the joint recording and collection of the successive locations experienced by the user (through the identification of the...
Article
Current trends in thinking on contemporary migration (in particular, theories on transnational networks) agree that today's migrants are the actors of a culture of bonds, which they themselves have founded and which they maintain even as they move about. Formerly a latent feature but typical of all groups on the move, this culture of bonds became v...
Article
Publié dans Hommes et Migrations, n°1240, 2002., pp. 66-81. Circuler tout en gardant le contact : l'usage du téléphone cellulaire a rendu cela facile. Les sans-papiers du mouvement de lutte issu de l'occupation de l'église Saint-Bernard à Paris et les Roumains migrants économiques illégaux ont, malgré le fait qu'ils s'ignorent le plus souvent, au m...

Citations

... The European Union (EU) funded DiaporaLink Project was started to investigate how diaspora groups can be supported by a web portal and what strategies might facilitate transnational diaspora entrepreneurship (DiaporaLink Project, 2016). Using ICT to support people in the diaspora has been tried earlier in EU projects with a successful result (Diminescu et al., 2009;Borkert, Cingolani & Premazzi, 2009). Today many persons in the diaspora have good English skills, but when it comes to more technical descriptions most people have easier to understand if instructions are given in their native language (Pierce & Robisco, 2010). ...
... Thanks to digital technologies, they have developed virtual communities to support their travel-and settlement-abroad. What is more, these technologies have allowed them to connect with their culture and traditions while living in the host country (Diminescu 2012). Inside these communities, members share valuable information about political, economic, and cultural assets. ...
... reports by Codagnone and Kluzer (2011) and Kluzer, Haché, and Codagnone (2008) on digital inclusion, with data on icts and the integration of immigrants into several european countries and other exploratory work, appear to reinforce this hypothesis (Boso and ros, 2010; ofcom, 2008). Qualitative research has demonstrated the role of ict in the integration of immigrants and the promotion of cultural diversity in the new network societies (Hepp, Welling, and Aksen, 2009; maya et al., 2009; Diminescu, 2002 Diminescu, , 2004 Nedelcu, 2009). in the current context of the network society, the integration of immigrants seems to imply much more than a simple process of socioeconomic insertion, civic and political participation or the mere internalization of the social norms and cultural values of the destination country. The integration of the immigrant population into the network society means " being connected " , in other words, 1) being able to intelligently combine mobility, autonomy and communication , 2) knowing how to make strategic use of connectivity networks and 3) striking a balance between relations with the country of origin and the destination country (Diminescu, 2008). ...
... 30.4% 54.3% Figure 9. "You are part of a group working on a project, and no one else is doing any work. What would you most likely do? 10 Stop w orking as w ell. ...
... ICT tools are becoming the most important mediator for maintaining ties between communities, by allowing a constant exchange of new information between migrants and their countries of origin. This in addition helps to foster the development of cross-border virtual networks that otherwise would be difficult to achieve, at the same time paving the way to the mergence of a connected migrant phenomena [6]. The use of social media is shaping migrant identities, and preserving migrant collective memory as well as identity, through helping to maintain bonds between geographically separated migrant communities. ...
... plusieurs années (Macilotti 2015 ; rapport ONU 2014), l'usage effectif du système mis en place est loin d'être efficace. En effet, dans le cadre de nos recherches, nous avons pu observer un phénomène qui montre les limites de ces politiques : chez les migrants -aussi bien les nouveaux arrivants que ceux qui sont installés en France depuis plusieurs années -la tendance est d'aller à la recherche d'une interaction avec un représentant institutionnel ou de la société civile plutôt qu'engager une interaction personne-machine (voir Kluzer & Haché 2009). Les extraits des interactions que nous avons analysés illustrent justement cette tendance, ainsi que les obstacles rencontrés dans la réalisation de procédures ou de recherche d'informations liées aux droits sociaux sur Internet (comme le raconte l'usager de l'extrait 1). ...
... Digitale Medien ermöglichen ebenso die Vernetzung mit einer virtuellen bzw. digitalen Diaspora (Brinkerhoff 2009;Diminescu und Loveluck 2014;Laguerre 2010;Leurs 2015), der virtuellen Community im Einwanderungsland, indem sich Migrierte zu kulturellen oder nationalstaatlichen Themen ihrer Herkunftsländer in Online-Foren austauschen und sich dadurch gegenseitig eine virtuelle Teilhabe ermöglichen (Laguerre 2010, 50). Kulturelle Traditionen und Werte können beispielsweise in persönlichen Social-Media-Profilen dargestellt werden, z. ...
... Men are the prime users of the Internet and in a most pronounced way, in Middle Eastern dating and chat sites-the topic in which we are most interested in this paper. In fact, in a survey of subscribers to muslima.com, for example, Diminescu and Renault (2011) found that in Middle Eastern countries, virtually all the users were men (see Figure 1). This means that the few women who dare to sign into the new media will have a wide selection of potential mates and people to chat with, while men will have very few alternatives. ...
... A highly mobile person has in fact greater probability to use a mobile phone that someone who only commutes between a few places where s/he can also communicate via a landline telephone, VoIP, etc. In the same way, the higher mobility in the city context is frequently associated with a distant coordination via a mobile phone (Diminescu et al. 2009), and the mobile communication is also linked to a management of the mobility itself: delays, traffic problems, last minute adjustments. Finally, correspondents of a highly mobile person learn with time which is the most adapted communication channel to reach this person, they will also contribute to reinforce the observed correlation. ...
... Les pratiques communicationnelles des migrants, portées et accentuées par l'usage des TIC, forment de vastes corpus de données à explorer. Captées directement depuis des flux d'informations live ou récupérées après coup dans des systèmes de stockage, ces données peuvent aider à comprendre le fonctionnement de certains réseaux transnationaux, tels que des systèmes de transfert d'argent par téléphone portable (Bounie et al., 2010), ou encore servir à mesurer l'intégration des migrants dans les pays d'accueil. Ce sont également des vecteurs de compréhension des modalités de surveillance déployées par les institutions pour contrôler les étrangers (Amoore, 2006). ...