This book examines the relationship between urban migrant movements, struggles and digitality which transforms public space and generates mobile commons. The authors explore heterogeneous digital forms in the context migration, border-crossing and transnational activism, displaying commonality patterns and inter-dependence.

This Open Access book investigates the methodological and ethical dilemmas involved when working with digital technologies and large-scale datasets in relation to ethnographic studies of digital migration practices and trajectories. Digital technologies reshape not only every phase of the migration process itself (by providing new ways to access, to share and preserve relevant information) but also the activities of other actors, from solidarity networks to border control agencies. In doing so, digital technologies create a whole new set of ethical and methodological challenges for migration studies: from data access to data interpretation, privacy protection, and research ethics more generally. Of specific concern are the aspects of digital migration researchers accessing digital platforms used by migrants, who are subject to precarious and insecure life circumstances, lack recognised papers and are in danger of being rejected and deported. Thus, the authors call for new modes of caring for (big) data when researching migrants’ digital practices in the configuration of migration and borders. Besides taking proper care of research participants’ privacy, autonomy, and security, this also spans carefully establishing analytically sustainable environments for the respective data sets. In doing so, the book argues that it is essential to carefully reflect on researchers’ own positioning as being part of the challenge they seek to address.

This open access book covers the main issues, challenges and techniques concerning the application of qualitative methodologies to the study of migration. It discusses theoretical, epistemological and empirical questions that must be considered before, during, and after undertaking qualitative research in migration studies. It also covers recent innovative developments and addresses the key issues and major challenges that qualitative migration research may face at different stages i.e. crafting the research questions, defining approaches, developing concepts and theoretical frameworks, mapping categories, selecting cases, dealing with concerns of self-reflection, collecting and processing empirical evidence through various techniques, including visual data, dealing with ethical issues, and developing policy-research dialogues. Each chapter discusses relative strengths and limitations of qualitative research. The chapters also identify the main drivers for qualitative research development in migration studies. It is a unique volume as it brings together a multidisciplinary perspective as well as illustrations of different issues derived from the research experience of the recognized authors. One additional value of this book is its geographic focus on Europe. It seeks to explore theoretical and methodological issues that are raised by distinctive features of the European context. This volume will be a useful reference source for scholars and professionals in migration studies and in social sciences as well. The publication is also addressed to graduate and post-graduate students and, more generally, to those who embark on the task of doing qualitative research for the first time in the field of migration.

In Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences, edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen, the contributing authors look into precarity. Precarity has become a buzzword in as well academia as among activist. The book depicts precarity as being both a condition and a mobilizing force for resistance. The volume asks questions that investigate conditions and resistance across diverse cases such as first generation urbanites in China, migrant pensioners and unemployed youth in Sweden and Spain, refugees in Germany, irregular and regular migrants in Southern Europe, Turkey, Russia the United States and South Africa. Contributors are: Susanne Bregnbæk, Ines Calzada, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Anna Gavanas, Gregoris Ioannou, Martin Bak Jørgensen, Irina Kuznetsova-Morenko, Ronaldo Munck, Dimitris Parsanoglou, John Round, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Peter Schultz Jørgensen, Nazlı Şenses, Vassilis Tsianos, Nicos Trimikliniotis, and Mimi Zou.

The Migration Mobile offers an account of the very different technologies implicated in border crossing and migration management. Borders have been sites of contestations and struggles over who belongs and who does not, who is and is not allowed to move freely in transnational or national spaces. Embedded as they are in the bordering process, policing and security practices produce the irregularity and illegitimacy of the migrating subject. At the same time, border practices simultaneously imply processes of dissidence and resistance. Border infrastructures and resistance to bordering practices refer to dynamic and complex interactions between migrants and non-human others, technologies at the borderland and elsewhere. Border guards, EU officials, Frontex officers, activists, NGOs and solidarity networks configure both hybrid alliances of humans/nonhumans and new virtual and urban spaces in order to enforce or resist bordering. Through analyses of empirical cases drawing from the European border regimes the book investigates how technologies employed by states and EU border agencies configure the border regimes; how spaces of migration are configured through uses and re-uses of high-tech technologies; and finally on how the border regimes and ‘the border industrial complex’ are contested reconfigured by the use of ICT by migrants and solidarity networks.

This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.

"A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars... It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things." - Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong "A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border." - Myria Georgiou, LSE "A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration... The book is poised to become a touchstone text." - C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a ′smart′ disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex. This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From ′top-down′ governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the ′bottom-up′ of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores: The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication. Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks. Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted. The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life. How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research. The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers. Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives. Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.

Is the European Union (EU) in a state of crisis? Over recent years, a series of systemic and spontaneous challenges, including Brexit, the rise of Euroscepticism and the Eurozone and refugee crises, have manifested in landmark moments for European integration. First published as a special issue of the journal Global Discourse, this edited collection investigates whether these crises are isolated phenomena or symptoms of a deeper malaise across the EU. Experts from across disciplines analyse and rethink the forces which pull Europeans together, as well as those which push them apart.

Publication following NeMe's project