Migrants and screens: A decolonial and anti-racist approach to mobility in the digital era

This paper investigates the everyday interactional digital practices of racialized high-skilled migrants in Europe allowing them to enact a translocal agency. The latter refers to the capacity of migrants to actively engage with, shape and influence multiple socio-geographic landscapes, thereby fostering a sense of belonging and identity across borders, and subverting traditional, Eurocentric frameworks that confine agency to static, bounded spaces. The focus is on the case of Finland insofar as it has a complex and prejudiced relationship to racialized peoples through its heretofore overlooked colonial history. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in decolonial visual ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, and critical phenomenology, this video-based research highlights how situated interactional digital practices of experience-sharing, knowledge-building, and community-enacting participate in the enactment by racialized translocals of their agency and networks of belonging. This research asserts that, in the digital era, racialized migrants ought to become empowered agents of their trajectories.