(Re)mediation as flourishing: Digital assemblages of care and the everyday biopolitics of claiming asylum

This paper explores what everyday digital assemblages of care do to the spatio-temporal experience of claiming asylum under political landscapes characterised by hostile governance affects. Drawing upon one year of participatory ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reimagines a wide range of smartphone practices – playing online games, using YouTube Kids or making WhatsApp chats – as assemblages of care which disrupt what it feels like to live within the UK's asylum application system. This paper presents these forms of care as practices of (re)mediation , highlighting the potentiality that digitally mediated care has in sustaining affirmative forms of living alongside, within, and under hostility. Sketching out three relations of flourishing – countering isolating urban infrastructure, becoming as a form of selfhood, and shifting cosmopolitan imaginaries – the paper sets out an account of affirmative living that emerges in an everyday posthuman assemblage between the human and smartphone. Where the intended consequences of hostile affects are disrupted (even where unremarkable, ephemeral, fleeting, or mundane), I suggest we are confronted with an updated reading of political theory – of various attempts to categorise forms of Othered life as bare, unliveable or unvalued – that must take seriously novel forms of digital flourishing.