SEMINAR CANCELLED | The digital border and its techno-symbolic assemblages of power

Unfortunately, due to UCU strike action, this seminar is now cancelled. 

RSC Public Seminar Series Hilary Term 2023

'Forced Migration and Digital Technologies: (Dis)continuities in Actors and Power Relations'

Series convenors: Dr Derya Ozkul and Dr Marie Godin

This year the RSC Public Seminar Series will take place through (usually) fortnightly seminars on Tuesday lunchtimes from 1-2pm, but please check the details for each seminar.

About the seminar

How do digital infrastructures control transnational mobility and the lives of migrants during and after they cross boundaries? And how do digital media shape imaginaries of transnational mobility as a crisis and of migrants as people who need to be feared or pittied? In this presentation, we argue that western governance of migration is now enacted through a technologized border that divides Us/Them and inside/outside. This is the digital border, which is performed both territorially and symbolically. We thus argue for a holistic approach to communication and migration, showing how intersecting technologies and imaginaries of transnational mobility turn the border into a multi-nodal site of platforms, actors, connections, voices and values. We draw on empirical insights from across Europe, collected through our research on the digital border over seven-year (2015-2022).

About the speakers

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Doctoral Programme Director. Prof Chouliaraki has a background in Languages and Linguistics, having completed her MA and PhD at Lancaster University Department of Linguistics. Her research has a strong interdisciplinary orientation, drawing on Social and Cultural Theory, Moral Philosophy and Sociology, Visual Communication and Social Semiotics as well as Discourse Theory and Analysis. Her main interest lies in understanding how the media shape our ethical and political relationship to distant others; how they inform the ways we witness the vulnerability of these others and the ways we are invited to feel, think and act towards them. Her empirical material has included disaster news, humanitarian and human rights communication, migration as well as war and conflict journalism, studying these in a historical perspective and across mass and digital media. 

Myria Georgiou is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Professor Georgiou researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of intensified mediation. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, she is committed to putting the human of the urban, transnationally connected world at the core of her research. Specifically, in research conducted across six countries over the last 20 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity.