Acceso usuarios
Colleen Boland
This thematic issue interrogates the relationship between digitalization and the social inclusion or exclusion of migrants in destination countries. Drawing on thirteen articles employing a breadth of methodological approaches across eight national contexts around the globe, it investigates whether digitalization phenomena simply reconfigure pre‐existing socioeconomic inequalities or demonstrate unprecedented, emergent dynamics. Three cross‐cutting themes structure the issue. First, authors provide timely evidence on migrant agency and digital practices, demonstrating how migrants navigate and reappropriate digital technologies. In doing so, they challenge exclusionary infrastructures and offline inequalities. Second, articles analyze the role of intermediary organizations, highlighting contrasting dynamics: On the one hand, state digitalization initiatives produce intentional or unintended exclusionary consequences; on the other, NGOs can leverage these technologies to support migrants in the face of old or technologically intertwined challenges. Finally, the issue zooms into a digital intermediary—the platform economy. Platformization creates new layers of precarity for migrant workers in food delivery and care sectors, and can be prevailed upon in migrant strategies to overcome exclusion. Ultimately, the query as to whether technologies and spaces of digitalization reinforce pre‐existing inclusion or exclusion or create new ones is answered in a nuanced, context‐specific manner that demands even further research: to some extent the embedded power relations in digitalization processes and practices do entail reproduction of the same, but new facets also emerge, and technologies can also be leveraged to challenge inequalities via migrant agency.
