Digital Ecosystems of Forced Displacement and Mobility

[mozfest-bot]

[ ID ] bc42bc31-a23a-4b96-8719-bd57f578ad90

[ Submitter's Name ] Claudia Aradau [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] King's College London [ Submitter's Twitter ] @claudia_aradau

[ Space ] digital [ Secondary Space ] digital

[ Format ] learning-lab

Description

As forced displacement reached 65.3 million globally in 2015, public and academic debates have increasingly focused on the role of digital technologies - from smartphones and social media to applications such as Facebook, Google Maps and WhatsApp - for the survival of displaced populations on the move. We propose a discussion of the role of digital ecosystems and data flows for new forms of mobility today and particularly for displaced populations. How can these be researched? What are the ethical implications of this research? What do digital ecosystems tell us about the individual and collective life of digital non-citizens on the move?

Agenda

We are at the beginning of several research projects that cover digital ecosystems of forced displacement. In particular, we plan to work with NGOs in Jordan and other countries with a high migrant population as well as local NGOs such as Techfugees to explore how mobiles and social media establish a new kind of community but also provide essential links to the outside world. While refugees are often not given citizenship rights in these countries, they use digital technologies to integrate and communicate. In the session, we would like to collectively develop and evaluate plans how to scope out digital ecosystems and understand the potential and limits of digital non-citizenship of displaced people and how their existence is shaped digitally.

Participants

All three organisers are experienced facilitators. Depending on the number of participants and the existing equipment, we can either hold an open discussion if there are very large numbers. Then, we will split up into smaller groups. If participants are willing and interested we can also demonstrate some of the tools we are using to explore connectivity in forced displacement situations from other grants we are involved with. We have worked successfully with mobile ecosystems in Our Data Ourselves (https://big-social-data.net/) and are also involved in a larger EU project called SoBigData (http://www.sobigdata.eu/), which integrates a number of tools for exploring social media and digital ecosystems. We will select a some of tools and realistic data sets to explore the connectivity of forced displacement. Again depending on the participants and conditions, we finally hope to demonstrate tools offered to refugees to support their existence (like http://basefugees.com/).

Outcome

While all the organisers have experience with either working with social data, digital ecosystems or forced migration, we are only at the beginning of brining our work together in new interdisciplinary research projects. We very much hope that we will get feedback from the community on how to proceed with the work and where relevant points of interest might lie. In this sense, participants have the opportunity to actively shape on-going, highly contemporary interdisciplinary research.

[EPIKhub]

@thornet @claudia_aradau this sounds really interesting as an IoT piece

[marcwalsh-zz]

Thanks for the submission! Unfortunately this session has not been selected as part of the program for 2016. Please expect an email from us with further information very soon.