Living Migration Through Digital Connectivity: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Migrant Belonging

Drawing on Diminescu’s manifesto on the “connected migrant”, this study explores how connected migrants use digital means to navigate everyday life in Greece and sustain transnational ties, and how these practices shape their feelings of belonging. By adopting a translocational framework that sees belonging as situated, relational, and positional, and a bottom-up approach to explore the everyday and banal digital practices of migrants, the research examines how belonging is negotiated across connections and positions that move beyond a single national attachment and identification. The study employs an interpretative phenomenological analysis based on four in-depth interviews with migrants from diverse national backgrounds living in Greece. The findings reveal that digital media functions simultaneously as infrastructural support, as a means for sustaining transitional relations and navigating settlement, and as a site of moral negotiation. Digital tools appear to enable migrants to access resources, exercise agency, and sustain everyday intimacy, but also to create emotional burden, moral pressure, and tensions, particularly in contexts marked by political repression, increased surveillance awareness, and unequal mobility. This study contributes to migration and digital media scholarship by exploring digitally mediated belonging as experienced across contexts and constraints. By focusing on the lived experience of connectivity and belonging, it demonstrates that connectivity does not simply empower or constrain migrants, but it reshapes the experience of migration itself.

Author dc:creator

• Castel Gallart Claudia

• Κοινωνικές, Πολιτικές και Οικονομικές επιστήμες
• Social, Political and Economic sciences

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

uoadl:5374554

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:lib.uoa.gr:uoadl:5374554