Migration narratives on social media: Digital racism and subversive migrant subjectivities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the role of social media in shaping narratives on migrants and refugees. The issue is organised into two parts. The first part offers analytical and empirical reflections on the dynamics of digital racism, xenophobia and polarisation on discourses by non-migrants, on migrants and refugees. The second part turns to the narratives promoted by migrants themselves through digital platforms as ways of both counteracting dominant narratives but also performing their own migrant subjectivity and creating a public digital identity for themselves. This introductory paper starts by offering a set of analytical considerations on the role of narratives in the communicative sphere in general and on the role of social media in particular with a view to framing the six paper contributions that follow.