Paper short abstract:

Body-suspensions practitioners are privileged travelers who cross Europe to attend festivals. Social media is central to the organization of these events where a sense of community is nourished. But is it merely a logistical tool or is it a means to prearrange physical meetings?

Paper long abstract:

Body-suspension practitioners travel for a mixture of pleasure, learning and, for some of them, professional growth. Suspension is an extreme body practice, where the skin is pierced by metal hooks holding protagonists in the air. Recently several suspension festivals were held in Europe, followed by intense virtual activities in order to call participants, to share pictures, or simply to create new contacts and cultivate friendships born during festivals.

Based on an ethnography in progress, this presentation aims to contribute to the discussion of social media's role in the community-making of body-suspension practitioners. From fieldwork data, suspension meetings involve intense emotional moments, face-to-face occasions where sharing controversial and painful actions contribute to the constitution of a moment outside of ordinary life. Interviewees' words use the emotional language of family to describe the group of practitioners. Festivalgoers' emotions are elaborated in Facebook posts and in picture captions conveying nostalgia and gratitude for each meeting. Thus the online activity is not merely logistical but enhances existing relations, cementing friendships and preparing for future reunions.

How do physical and virtual factors influence relationship-making process? Can virtual proximity nourish physical intimacy? How is virtual activity is responsible for creating a sense of family for body suspension practitioners?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways location-independent families (LIF) negotiate their idea of home and belonging while traveling the world with their children. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, it explores the role played by digital tools as main catalysts of socialization.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ways location-independent families (LIF) negotiate their idea of home and belonging while traveling the world with their children. Location-independence is a form of lifestyle mobility based on the possibility of running an online business from anywhere in the world and the choice to worldschool the children, a growing alternative education practice based on immersive, experiential learning. Many location-independent families document their journeys through a variety of digital media: personal websites, blogs, podcasts and social media forums. These tools, initially a means to share the family journey and inspiring other people to adopt this lifestyle, become the main catalysts of socialization, not aimed at people who are physically proximate, but rather share the same values and lifestyle.

Drawing on an examination of families' stories based on in-depth interviews and digital ethnography, including analysis of online materials, the paper illustrates how LIFs' imagination of home and belonging is not bound to a static, fixed, geographical place but takes a contextual and processual dimension, as social process and lived experience.

Paper short abstract:

Departing from on-going fieldwork among relative affluent Swiss nationals in Northern Europe, this paper seeks to explore the 'new space' social media creates for people with mobility experience.

Paper long abstract:

When moving to a new place, most of the familiar social structures and the various safety-nets fall away. The much-needed networks both for professional and private

purposes, have to be built up again. Thereby social media can play a crucial role. It offers new possibilities for gaining access to local information about the new place(s) of

residence. A new aspect social media platforms offers is the option to stay anonym in the process of gaining valuable knowhow in the country of arrival. Furthermore, as

communication on social media happens usually in written form, the virtual space of social media is accessible for those who have rather low oral language skills as well.

This fact distinguishes the more 'conventional' face-to-face knowledge acquisition of what newly arrived migrants need to gather in order to organize their social and professional life anew.

In the case of my research project, significant changes occurred for those emigrants who left Switzerland 40 - 50 years ago. At that time neither transport nor

communication was sufficiently developed or affordable which made the mobility experience a total different one. For instance, in some cases private landlines were not

available yet at that time. Hence, the experience of and with social media in the context of migration opens up a whole new frame of reference.

The final part of the paper seeks to explore the ability of social media to actually offer a virtual (third) space in times of transition and how that space is shaped.

Paper short abstract:

PhD studies graduates usually face necessity to become mobile and apply on many post-doc positions. I would like to present how this forced mobility influences their perceived sense of stability of social relations and how they struggle to maintain it by digital means of communication.

Paper long abstract:

Graduates of doctoral studies that want to continue academic career usually face necessity to apply on postdoctoral researcher position to many universities and research institutes. Low number of open positions virtually precludes applying only to home university or within one country. Perspective of such forced mobility is a major decision factor when choosing one’s career path and may lead to disturbance of sense of stability, despite being simultaneously perceived as a chance to gain experience, professional development or improving one’s social status. Necessity of changing places of living and short-term contracts are reasons for their reduced perceived levels of stability – not only in economic sense, but also connected with social relations. For many young academics that means separation from their friends and significant others, making digital communication necessary to maintain social relations. This is especially important since for many post-docs it is hard to allocate time to build new social networks. I have carried out multi-sited research accompanying, observing and talking with PhD students and graduates in Cracow, London, Stockholm and Zurich and in this paper I would like to present the importance of such means of communication for dealing with non-permanent migration. However digital presence is seen as a mere substitute for the physical and this aspect is often an important factor during negotiations of ways in which they wish to experience mobility, influencing decisions relating places they apply or how many years they wish to spend in a state of academic precarity.

Paper short abstract:

By following the journeys of Afro-feminist performers, the work explores transnational mobility and digital practices as a social norm conditioning relations of work, love and friendship. It discusses how mobility impacts on existential understandings of self.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the case of two Afro-feminist activists, performers and researchers, the work uses biographical analysis to explore the perceptions of transnational mobility as a social norm conditioning relations of work, love and friendship. By following the journeys of the two activists, I will retrace the evolution of an inherently mobile lifestyle and how it impacts on existential understandings of self as mobile. I will trace how both subjects weave mobility into their lives and how they create a sense of homeliness that is deeply rooted in their understanding of being able to create home wherever they go - through activity (dance), through the creation of small routines while travelling as well as through their relation to each other - their understanding as a "we" instead of "me". I will show that for both transnational travel as well as being visible on social media has become a condition to build and practice community in a double sense: experiencing a globally entangled Afro-diasporic and feminist community as well as relating to, and building, a global network with dancers, performers and researchers. The condition to maintain these transnational contacts and global network as well as to gain potential new work and travel opportunities are promoted by digital practices that become part of their routines in mobility. The ethnographic data produced during participation in travels as well as through lifestory interviews will be used for a discussion on the sense of motility/mobility as both existential and geographical (Ingold 2011, Hage 2009).

Paper short abstract:

The report examines the functions of mobile social networks in the translocal rural communities of Dagestan which could be the way to organize social rites, transfer information, consolidate the community, provide a power and economic resources as well as the stage for reputation demonstrating.

Paper long abstract:

The report examines the mechanisms of functioning of social networks in the translocal rural communities of Dagestan, North Caucasus, whose members have been participating in labor inner-Russian migration to Moscow and mining centers in Siberia. Huge distances and various socio-cultural and economic differences between sending and receiving societies issue a challenge for the unity of rural community - jamaat. Rural identity is relevant for migrants: they preserve the principle of rural endogamy, bury all the dead migrants in their village, spend money and time for the development of the village, activists create public organizations of fellow villagers. The report will focus on the practice of using mobile social networks - Facebook and its Russian counterparts - by transmigrants, their families and fellow villagers. Mobile communication provide everyday family communication, be an opportunity to organize necessary social rites as finding a bride, matchmaking, passing money for condolences, as well as transferring important information for migrants and those living in the village. Rural chats consolidate the community and even formulate the idea of the unity, and also become a power, violent and economic resources in migration. At the same time, the villagers'chats are the places where the laws of reputation are working especially in the conditions of Islamic revival and religious radicalization in Dagestan, therefore they also carry a danger to migrants, especially for women. In this case, people try to find alternative ways for personal discussions not to fear publicity and condemnation by fellow countrymen and violence from the relatives.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the lives of Mongolian long-distance truckers dwelling in LA. Contradicting representations of the digital and the physical as counterposed it argues that for these workers the digital plays an essential role in creating localities where physical intimacy might occur.

Paper long abstract:

The American long-distance trucking industry has become an essential and productive lynchpin in supply chains creation of value (Tsing, 2009; Cowen, 2010). Concurrently deregulation made collective bargaining increasingly difficult for truckers (Belzer, 1995; Cowen, 2014). Thus just at the moment at which trucking has become crucial it has also become likened to a sweatshop as its workers labor for long days and spend considerable time away from family, and have seen their relative remuneration decline (Belzer, 2000; Belman and Monaco, 2001).

Despite these hardships many of the Mongolian-Angeleno men I met not only took to trucking but spoke of it positively. They constructed a narrative of long-distance trucking as both respectable and preferable to other forms of blue-collar labor. A key aspect of these accounts was the freedom trucking offered them. They were able to make their own hours and the limited oversight allowed for the creation of temporary locales for physical socialization. For these truckers communications technology was not just a tool of phatic labor, but an essential element in the creation of vital and necessary forms of physical co-presence with their fellow truckers. While in recent years a moral panic has engulfed the digital counterposing it as a toxic counterpart to the physical (Turkle, 2011), I argue here that the forms of digital communication long-distance truckers were engaged in were central to their creation of localities. I thus, as others have done (Boellstorff, 2016), suggest a positive role for the digital.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on "countless mobilities" (Urry, 2001), this paper examines social media and technology vis-à-vis intimacy, friendship, and kinship in the lives of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Houston, Texas. (Im)mobility means navigating ambivalence, consciousness, and depths of human connectedness.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on the concept of "countless mobilities" (Urry, 2001), this paper examines how social media and technology creates intimacy, friendship, and kinship in the lives of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Houston, Texas. Houston is America's 4th largest city where 1 in 10 people are foreign born, thus contributing to its status as America's most ethnically diverse city. Refugee families migrated during the Obama administration are newly "immobile" in the wake of the so-called "Muslim Ban", Technology offers digital place making and alternate virtual sanctuary. Having dinner with loved ones at a great physical distance via Facetime fosters imagined community more pleasurable than face-to-face encounters with new neighbors whose culture, language, experiences feel unknown. Here, we must reconsider the essence of mobility, and the complex nature of "resettlement" itself. Technology offers openings and new possibilities, but it also creates the "unsettling" effects of being able, for example, to watch via Goggle satellite how one's homeland has changed, and to process those jarring images alongside nostalgic photos and videos of homelands as they once were before forced displacement. Navigating between alternate forms of reality may help, or hinder, feeling authentically (re)settled into a new home. The refugee body may have escaped the physical threats of war, but experiencing safety in the heart and mind is another matter altogether. The new normalcy of (im)mobility means navigating ambivalent and disjointed layers of reality and consciousness, negotiating multiple depths of privacy, and experiencing multiple understandings of proximity and connectedness.

Paper short abstract:

In Athens, queer/cis refugees negotiate their relations in the midst of desires for mobility and local emotional safety. Thus, their mobiles become a political object while being an intimate companion. Navigating their belongings some use the social media to endorse inclusive human rights.

Paper long abstract:

Feeling abandoned on the streets of Athens, Paul, a queer refugee, wrote the song “Gone”. It describes well, how in refugee worlds, having a friend or a partner is riddled with complexities of safety and danger. When Paul reached France a few months later, he turned the song into a Youtube video, as he aspired to become a recognized artist and awarded a refuge in Paris. Thus, he hoped sufferings would assemble towards a qualified life (Fassin, 2010) for himself and others in similar position. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Greece in 2012-2015, where I observed how refugee men from Middle Eastern, Asian and Sub-Sahara countries negotiated their masculinities. I focus on how men who did and did not identify with the gender ascribed to them at birth communally negotiated imaginaries of modern love and friendship. While sharing tight spaces, men’s mobilization and safety would often depend on how they were able to network, through physical presence and social media, among their compatriots and other supportive groups. Thus, cis-gendered refugee men would re-negotiate what kind of sexual practices were acceptable for themselves and in their social circle. At the same time, queer/gay refugees would identify with the border struggles and romances of their cis male friends, while only exposing their sexual orientation to a select few. Participating in solidarity networks, however, allowed some refugees the supportive space to visibly endorse the rights of other marginalized groups and to demonstrate their emergent masculinities (Inhorn 2012).