Resilience Practices Under Platformed Displacement: A Phenomenology of Refugee Digital Entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT Digital technologies are often depicted as equalizers, yet high‐skilled refugees encounter platform‐mediated constraints that shape their entrepreneurial pursuits across borders. Through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of eight Syrian digital entrepreneurs in Istanbul, we examine how founders experience constraints in payments, identity verification, and platform access controls. Drawing on a practice‐based perspective, we conceptualize resilience as situated agency enacted through creative reconfiguration of sociotechnical arrangements. Our analysis describes three core resilience practices: platformed improvisation, institutional workarounds, and transformative identity work. Through these practices, founders recombine digital services, navigate opaque compliance regimes, and sustain professional continuity. We interpret these experiential patterns alongside platform governance documents and NGO/policy reports to contextualize how founders encountered, made sense of, and responded to eligibility checks, account restrictions, and compliance routines. This study offers an experience‐first account of platformed displacement, tracing how agency and meaning‐making are enacted under platform‐mediated constraints and contributing to research on refugee entrepreneurship, digital infrastructure, and resilience as practice.