Papers by Saskia Witteborn
International Journal of Communication, 2024
This article illustrates how transborder knowledge migrants cocreate sociotechnical imaginary in ... more This article illustrates how transborder knowledge migrants cocreate sociotechnical imaginary in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) in the wake of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews with migrant-led and-staffed startups and analysis of documents published by the Hong Kong SAR government and its institutions, the study shows how these actors shape an imaginary of socioeconomic well-being through technological innovation and diversity. Young people are protagonists in this narrative and are envisioned as transforming desires for political emancipation into desires for self-actualization and creative labor for the common good. The startups' narrative of growth through technology backs the official narrative of the innovative knowledge society firmly embedded in a sovereign China. By referring to other regions in the world, the study argues that migrants become a socioeconomic prosthesis for a society under pressure as they are implicated in narratives of cultural and economic reproduction that serve political goals.
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2022
Digitalization, digitization, and datafication-referred to as the three Ds transforming forced mi... more Digitalization, digitization, and datafication-referred to as the three Ds transforming forced migration management-are composed of practices of abstraction which constitute socio-spatial processes and the imaginary supporting these processes. Against the backdrop of migration management initiatives in Germany and in the European Union, the article highlights how practices like data sharing and predictive modeling create a space of abstraction which is consolidated by the imaginary of quantification and automation. This space and imaginary, based on the premises of efficiency, transparency, and control and actualized by a technocratic apparatus, define the management of migration as well as the figure of the migrant. The article concludes that the three Ds will increasingly shape forced migrants' lives through the leveling logics of technocratic control. Academic attention to data ownership and data justice is more important than ever.
Convergence, 2021
The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced m... more The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced migration. The literature has demonstrated that displaced people engage in digital placemaking to create belonging and to actualize aspirations. Simultaneously, state and suprastate actors expand digital data practices, which construct forced migrants as categories in digital place, thereby configuring their access to physical locations and to socio-legal positioning. This article argues that the digital data practices of both state and suprastate actors, such as biometric registration and metadata tracing, appropriate digital placemaking practices by forced migrants and dissect migrants' subjectivity into data fragments that become agentic in shaping how the people access physical territory, identities, and resources. The article highlights opportunities for researching forced mobilities, place, and technologies. These opportunities include the study of nonhuman actors in placemaking processes, exploring the locus of agency in digital placemaking, and studying the intersections between embodied and digital placemaking practices.
Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, Jul 14, 2016
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2020
Communication, Culture and Critique, 2022
Digitalization, digitization, and datafication—referred to as the three Ds transforming forced mi... more Digitalization, digitization, and datafication—referred to as the three Ds transforming forced migration management—are composed of practices of abstraction which constitute socio-spatial processes and the imaginary supporting these processes. Against the backdrop of migration management initiatives in Germany and in the European Union, the article highlights how practices like data sharing and predictive modeling create a space of abstraction which is consolidated by the imaginary of quantification and automation. This space and imaginary, based on the premises of efficiency, transparency, and control and actualized by a technocratic apparatus, define the management of migration as well as the figure of the migrant. The article concludes that the three Ds will increasingly shape forced migrants’ lives through the leveling logics of technocratic control. Academic attention to data ownership and data justice is more important than ever.
... A Social Construction Approach. Authors: WITTEBORN Saskia. Subjects: Interpersonal Communicat... more ... A Social Construction Approach. Authors: WITTEBORN Saskia. Subjects: Interpersonal Communication Social Constructionism. Issue Date: 2005. Publisher: Roxbury Publishing Company. Citation: WITTEBORN Saskia, STEWART John, ZEDIKER E. Karen. ...
Telematics and Informatics
Abstract We investigate the role of creative skilled migrants in broadcasting an alternative use ... more Abstract We investigate the role of creative skilled migrants in broadcasting an alternative use of technology in support of a sustainable smart city. We do so by analyzing the themes they produced on Twitter. We focus on Amsterdam as a case, and urban planners and designers as examples of creative migrants. Computational methodology allowed for a selection of naturally occurring data in social media. We show that the creative migrants actively contribute to shaping the smart-sustainable city through the themes of top-down technological solutions and bottom-up participation by highlighting innovative uses of technology in support of the environment and citizens’ needs. However, the migrants do not question received historical and geopolitical power constellations. Moreover, they propose the Western city as a role model for solving pressing urban problems.
The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture, 2019
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2021
The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced m... more The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced migration. The literature has demonstrated that displaced people engage in digital placemaking to create belonging and to actualize aspirations. Simultaneously, state and suprastate actors expand digital data practices, which construct forced migrants as categories in digital place, thereby configuring their access to physical locations and to socio-legal positioning. This article argues that the digital data practices of both state and suprastate actors, such as biometric registration and metadata tracing, appropriate digital placemaking practices by forced migrants and dissect migrants’ subjectivity into data fragments that become agentic in shaping how the people access physical territory, identities, and resources. The article highlights opportunities for researching forced mobilities, place, and technologies. These opportunities include the study of nonhuman actors in placemaking pro...
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2020
This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as p... more This panel introduces and critically examines the concept of "digital placemaking" as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media use. As populations and the texts they produce become increasingly mobile, such practices are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a sense of belonging and familiarity in place. The concept of digital placemaking is both a theoretical and applied response to the spatial fragmentation, banal physical environments, and community disintegration thought to have accompanied the speed and scale of globalization—the implications of which include suggestions that our collective sense of place has been disrupted, leaving people unsure of their belonging within conditions and boundaries that seem increasingly fluid. While it is imperative to attend to the shifting social, econo...
Feminist Media Studies, 2020
The paper explores privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement. It makes a case against technoc... more The paper explores privacy in collapsed contexts of displacement. It makes a case against technocentric and universalizing definitions of privacy by exploring its relational and contextual dimensions, including cultural expectations and the political and economic conditions of seeking asylum. In particular, this paper discusses how displaced women seeking asylum in Germany employed the practice of hiding (e.g., physical movement and the use of digital devices) to engage with digital support networks. The women pushed for expanding and protecting their digital social relations, but this protection came at the cost of harassment and reinforced privacy norms, limiting their physical movement and digital communication. The paper highlights that those reinforced privacy norms are not just a reductive move to preserve collective values but should also be read as a protective response to legal and sociocultural uncertainty related to displacement.
Cultural Studies, 2020
Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have... more Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film's immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the script of suffering and hope. Through analysis of humanitarian VR films, the use of character, narrative, and formal VR film devices, we show how empathy is created. Thereby, we focus specifically on the simulation of particular locales, intimate encounters with the suffering Other, and gratification of viewer needs. The paper concludes that humanitarian VR films simulate an engagement with global problems when, in fact, they are catering to the emotional needs of people engaging with those problems. The global citizen as a feeling self becomes caught in interpersonal affective textures, which obscure geopolitical causes of humanitarian crises. Hence, the paper questions empathy as a universal way to better the world and diverges from the celebration of humanitarian VR film as a universal empathy machine.
Regular Issue, 2009
This article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of... more This article explicates grouping processes during a public meeting. By applying an Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis approach, the analysis focuses on ways of place-making and relating as well as enactments of social and racial identities to make empirically grounded claims about grouping processes during the public meeting in question. For most audience members, living in the neighborhood and local knowledge of crime, desperate youth, poverty, and racial discrimination were defining characteristics of being a community member who shared a collective memory of distrust against the local Chamber of Commerce. Some audience members maintained that only neighborhood residents had the right to talk about the neighborhood at the meeting. Chamber of Commerce and affiliated speakers neither shared the premise of residency and right to talk about the neighborhood, nor did they adequately address the distrust. Instead, they promoted community through economic develo...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
He received his doctorate majoring in history of science in 2011 from Shanghai Jiao Tong Universi... more He received his doctorate majoring in history of science in 2011 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, including two years of joint training in the University of Pennsylvania (2008-2010). His research focus is on new scientific and technological revolutions, and industrial transformation, especially the social impact and governance of AI. He regularly participates in the formulation of Chinese government strategies and plans on AI.
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Papers by Saskia Witteborn