Dividing Latin American activist labour in post-Brexit Britain

This article describes how Latin American advocacy and activist groups operating in the United Kingdom engage in identity work through their collaboration with one another, the creation of discourses around cultural identity and the division of activist labour. By examining how the members of these groups plan their strategies, collaborate and use digital platforms to perform and construct identity, mobilize support and partner with ally groups, the author sheds light on some ways in which identity movements facing the threat of geopolitical shifts, such as Brexit, participate in identity work under precarious conditions. This article demonstrates how a bifurcation of activist labour represents two different but concurrent approaches to identity work for Latin American activists in post-Brexit Britain. It argues that such precarity challenges the primacy of Latinidad as a strategic resource for activists and, instead, encourages alternative forms of solidarity.

Between authoritarianism and democracy: Examining news media usage for political re-socialization and information acquisition in diasporic contexts

While political scholars study news media as agents of political learning, the processes of political re-socialization of a conflict-generated diaspora moving from authoritarian to democratic regimes pose significant theoretical challenges that remain insufficiently researched. To this end, this study investigates the importance of traditional and digital media sources from the homeland and host country in fostering refugees’ understanding of the democratic norms and values, and political opportunities offered by the receiving country. Furthermore, it investigates the role of online diaspora communities as agents for political re-socialization and tools for information acquisition about Arabic, Swiss and international politics. Sixty semi-structured interviews with Arabs from refugee origins in Switzerland were analysed. Findings show the influence of the early-life political socialization, received prior to forced migration, on the purposive consumption of media from various sources. As Facebook started to lose its value as a source of political information, participants shift to producing and consuming news distributed by strong ties on private WhatsApp groups as a counter-strategy to acquire trustworthy information. Further insights on the impact of perceived media credibility and individual trust in news on the consumption behaviour and political learning are discussed.

Between ‘filter bubbles’ and community leaders: An exploratory study of Facebook groups for Russophones/Russians in the Netherlands

Through an exploration of Facebook groups designed for Russophones and Russians in the Netherlands, this study considers online community belonging negotiations. In doing so, the article aims to address the role of online administrators (admins) in online community construction, seeking to enrich the algorithm-centric literature covering customized feeds. The authors argue that by moderating discussions, approving and banning users, and setting the agenda more generally in the online environments that they create and manage, admins acquire and perform functions that may surpass or compliment algorithmic biases.

Black migrants in Brazilian and South African tabloids: Representations on the Global South

This work investigates how Afro-migrants are represented within a Brazilian and a South African tabloid in terms of race and ethnicity. It also employs scorpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to analyse verbal language. Results suggest that the two newspapers represent black migrants in the light of criminality, either as victims or perpetrators. They often place migrants as beneficiaries of charity, especially in the Brazilian case, and more as perpetrators in the South African case. Passivization of migrants is noticeable in both tabloids; however, the Brazilian outlet resorts mostly to reported speech and editing of the migrants’ voices while the South African offers them either freer speech or silencing. Ultimately, Afro-Latin philosophical principles such as self-determination and empathetic zeal are often times neglected across many depictions.

On the issue of diaspora’s terminological dispersal

This analytical scoping review contributes to the debate about the diaspora’s terminological dispersal that has dominated scholarly discourse in the past two decades. The author argues that diaspora as a ‘metaphoric designation’ is a useful conceptual entry point to chart the multiplicity of ways in which diaspora research has evolved in the twenty-first century. From this premise, diaspora as a ‘metaphoric designation’ mitigates against the ‘nostalgia-premised’ definitions of diasporas and could resolve the concerns about ‘terminological dispersal’ that have proliferated in diaspora studies.

‘Globalized difference’: Identity politics on social media

By drawing on an ethnographic study of digital communication practices of Serbian Londoners, this article identifies a new form of subtle spontaneous identity politics on social media that seeks to reassert national identity and present it both as an exotic difference and as cosmopolitan. It argues that this form of identity politics has been brought about thanks to social surveillance on social media, the context of London ‐ as a global city ‐ and the particular socio-historical position of the Serbian national identity. Thus, this article contributes to the socio-technical approach to social media, which considers both technical properties of social media and a range of social factors, including users’ agency, in understanding the social consequences of social media. The article concludes that this identity politics is ambivalent in its character ‐ while it is a source of empowerment, it also tends to commodify difference.

The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration, Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala (eds) (2019)

Review of: The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration, Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala (eds) (2019)Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 684 pp.,ISBN 978-1-52644-721-0, e-book, $93

Ethnic Media in the Digital Age, Sherry S. Yu and Matthew D. Matsaganis (eds) (2019)

Review of: Ethnic Media in the Digital Age, Sherry S. Yu and Matthew D. Matsaganis (eds) (2019)New York: Routledge, 216 pp.,ISBN 978-1-13848-648-5, h/bk, $129.78ISBN 978-1-351045-31-5, e-book, $57.95

Introduction to the diasporic autobiographical documentary

This article aims to introduce a new film genre that I call ‘diasporic autobiographical documentary’ that I have been working on during my last years of research, first in France and now in a broader context. In this genre, diasporic cinema and autobiographical documentary meet and create an original ensemble, especially produced in the last twenty years, in order to give place to the search for identity by individuals belonging to more than one nation and culture. In the first part, the present text exposes the principal axes of definition of this body of work, following Raphaëlle Moine’s theory of film genre. In the second part, it deals with two concepts necessary to understand the main issues of this genre: the diasporic subject and the origin. In the search of their lost origin and of their collective memories, diasporic subjects negotiate their identity through the subjective enunciation of the documentary, and offer an important work of reflection on today transnationalism and multiculturalism.