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On 21 April, Melis Mevsimler (Media and Culture Studies) defends her dissertation titled "Translocal Modes of Belonging: Diasporic Identity and Digital Media Amongst Migrant Women in London".

Migrant women and digital technologies

Over the last decade in Britain, dominant media narratives and populist representations have played a significant dual role representing migration as a crisis and reducing migrants’ identities to racialised stereotypes. In response to this, Mevsimler turns attention to how migrant women use digital technologies for communication, representation, and recognition. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses media studies, urban studies, diaspora studies, and migration studies, and by employing a rich ethnographic approach, she explores how migrant women originally from Turkey, Somalia, and Romania, now living in London, mediate their cultural identities at the intersections of urban and digital spaces.

Translocational belonging

Mevsimler's thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarly work that examines the relationships between diaspora, migration, and digital media, by further elaborating upon how the interplay of urban and technological dynamics co-constitutes gendered diasporic identities. She proposes translocational modes of belonging as a means by which to understand how, on urban, national, and transnational scales, the social positionalities of migrant women vary due to shifting, complex power geometries, and how they use digital technologies to develop collective identities and relations of inclusion and exclusion accordingly in a reflexive manner.