Session Name: Digitally mediated mobilities and migration practices in/from Asia
2 - Transnational Mobilities in the Digital Age: Social Media and Migration Infrastructure in the Vietnam-Australia Corridor
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract The burgeoning literature on migration and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provides rich empirical evidence of how social media and networking platforms have emerged as powerful catalysts (re)shaping transnational migration flows across contexts. The emerging social-digital connectivity transcends geographical boundaries, facilitates the creation of virtual communities, alters the informational landscape, and transforms migrants’ aspirations, experiences, and desires for citizenship and belonging. Drawing from a qualitative study conducted between 2019-2023 on the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor, I discuss how virtual communities and digitally mediated migration infrastructure shape migrants’ aspirations, practices, and the ways they navigate the restrictive, but also defective, neoliberal migration regimes in the Global North. Social media facilitate brokers’ access to a wide range of potential clients, but also challenge their previously dominant position in migration mediation negotiations. A focus on migration mediation at intersection of social-digital spheres generates vital insights into the continually evolving relationships between the state, market and the migrant subject in the Digital Age.
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