For further information please e-mail: info <at> digitalcrossroads.nl

Keynote speakers:

Shakuntala Banaji

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Kirsten Drotner

University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Radhika Gajjala

Bowling Green State University, USA

Eva Lam

University of Northwestern, USA

Lisa Nakamura

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Liesbet van Zoonen

Loughborough University, UK and Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Because of the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large), has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders – Appadurai 1996, p. 41, Modernity at Large

The rapid development of digital technologies has radically transformed ways of keeping in touch with home cultures and diasporic networks. Moreover, the notion of migration has undergone significant shifts, coming to signifyimaginaries on the move which are not necessarily linked to geographical displacement. The aim of this conference is to address the relationship between migration and digital technologies across national contexts and ethnic belonging. Migrancy embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that alsopertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. However, the link between the two fields is still under-theorized and in need of more situated and comparative analysis. Drawing from approaches from the humanities and social sciences (media theory, communication studies, learning sciences, gender studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, migration and transnational studies, among others), the primary aim of this conference is to explore how the study of digitalization and migration challenges existing notions of diaspora, identity, nation, family, learning, literacy, social networks, youth, body, gender and ethnicity, asking for new approaches and a rethinking of traditional social and cultural categories.

The conference comes at the end of a five-year High Potential project, entitled “Wired Up: Digital media as innovative socialization practices for migrant youth”, carried out by the Faculty of Humanities (project leader Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi) and the Faculty of Social Sciences (project leader Prof. Dr. Mariette de Haan) at Utrecht University in collaboration with Vanderbilt University, USA (Dr. Kevin Leander, Peabody College for Education). The project was funded by the Executive Board of Utrecht University to stimulate interdisciplinary research. See http://www.uu.nl/wiredup.