Migration > Aktiviteter > Migrationsinitiativets seminarer > Media, Migration, and ...
Media, Migration, and the Moral Economy of Long-distance Communication
Research seminar with Ulla Berg, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
Discussant: Nauja Kleist, Project Senior Researcher, DIIS, Copenhagen
Time and venue
May 12 2010, CSS, Øster Farimagsgade 5, room 18.1.08 at 14:15-16:00
Migration scholars have long pointed to the challenges that migrants face when managing social, cultural, and affective ties and expectations in numerous locations and countries at the same time. Less attention has been given to the role of ICT's in accomplishing the production and maintenance of these ties. This paper discusses the efforts by Peruvian labor migrants in the U.S. and their family members in Peru to communicate across national borders and social contexts using both "old" and "new" technologies to this end. While providing the possibility of staying in touch, and of expressing support, love, and affect over great geographical distances, I show how ICTs also produce undesirable forms of presence, surveillance, and control within migrant networks. Furthermore, the uptake of specific technologies is shaped by the socio-economic predicaments in which migrants encounter themselves and must be seen in relation to the political economy of everyday life. This seminar focuses on the long-distance communicative practices linking migrants' social worlds in home and destination country, the moral, affective, and legal economies that shape them, and the larger political and economic structures in which they are embedded.
