The Digital Border

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou.

You’ll hear about:

• What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication;
• How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively;
• Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of media such as social media and journalism;
• A discussion of humanitarian securitization vis a vis entrepreneurial securitization;
• How to understand the theoretical shift from the “crisis of migration” to the “crisis of responsibility”;
• How do we contend the different temporalities of resistance as various actors produce or respond to border technologies and infrastructures;
• As the displacement of people are intensifying, what frameworks and toolkits can be useful for us to rethink global migration against the “crisis of imaginary” (imaginary as a representational framework that people normatively think about certain issues);
• What are the futures of globalization and its counter movements in Global North from the perspectives of migration and bordering;
• What are the areas the authors wish to further explore in the future.

About the book

What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. You can find this book on the NYU Press website.

Authors:

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication.

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of five books, including Diaspora, Identity and the Media; Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference; and the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

Host: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media. His forthcoming monograph, Border Tunnels (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) examines how media forms and technologies shape perceptions about the borderlands and help reimagine the stakes of border-making practices.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. As a media scholar and sociocultural anthropologist, her research and teaching focus on the anthropology of media and Islam, digital sound studies, and transnational feminism. Her works have appeared in New Media & Society, Asian Anthropology, Made in China Journal, and more.

Keywords

Digital border, migration, technology, power, social media, journalism, securitization, representation, crisis, humanitarianism, human rights

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.