[Linganth] Call for Papers on Mediatization, the Digital, the Transnational

[Mariam Durrani]

Dear all,

I'm organizing a panel for AAA Denver, pasted below. We have a discussant,
Dr. Agha, and 3 paper presenters at the moment. We are looking for two
additional papers. If you would be interested in contributing a paper,
please include a title, 250-word abstract, and three keywords.

All the best,

Mariam

​Mariam Durrani​
*Doctoral Candidate (ABD)
<https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/people/durrani>​ in ​**Anthropology
& Educational Linguistics*
*University of Pennsylvania​*
​www.mariamdurrani.com​


*Transnational Processes of Mediatization within a Digital Moment*

Digital sociality is a relatively new space for ethnographic inquiry. As
such, anthropologists are beginning analyze the online/offline engagements
of ethnographic subjects. And yet, we are not starting from zero when we
consider the online lives of participants, particularly when we consider
recent scholarship. Through the implied juxtaposition of the
‘virtual’/online with the ‘real’/offline, digital researchers inadvertently
created a bifurcation of the digital and the non-digital. The two were
considered analytically separate until the work of digital anthropologists
who argue that the digital/online worlds are simply another social arena,
similar to offline worlds, and that we as ethnographers have no reason to
privilege one over another because social life is not more mediated simply
because humans are no more cultural than we were before the onslaught of
technology (Boelstorff 2008; Horst & Miller, 2012). The digital has been
defined as any phenomena that can be reduced to or has been developed by
binary code. Horst and Miller posit that this reduction to baseline 2 can
be seen analogous to the humanity’s earlier ability to reflect on social
life with the baseline of 10, or the systems of making modern money. This
abstraction allowed anthropologists to consider the consequences of money
for humanity, similar to how we are interested in the consequences of the
digital for our research engagements in transnational contexts. For this
panel, the papers will cover the Pakistan/US, Peru/Spain, Liberia/US
transnational contexts. In each context we also see the ways that imperial
and/or (formerly) colonial nations are reframed through the digital space
with subjects who have originated elsewhere.

Scholars have begun to posit a “dialectic” relationship between the
national and the transnational in order to understand the relational
categories which delimit and create possibilities for human movement (Doyle
2009). This panel extends this dialectic to re-examine analytic frameworks
such as migration studies, diaspora studies, and globalization (Vertovec
2003; Kearney 1995; Fox 2005) as mediatized processes. Mediatization, the
process whereby institutional practices reflexively link processes of
communication to processes of commoditization (Agha), can in turn serve as
a framing device to consider how the digital facilitates commoditization of
the transnational subject and her aspirational trajectories. As all of our
our social practices become exponentially transnational, particularly given
the proliferation of digital infrastructures, this panel seeks to present
mediatized processes as part and parcel of the formation of transnational
subjecthood, shaping migrants and non-migrants’ parallel journeys a world
away. The panel begins with a premise founded in transnational studies,
which offers an optic that “begins with a world without borders [and]
empirically examines the boundaries and borders that emerge at particular
moments” (Khagram & Levitt 2007: 5). In this sense, transnational
anthropology performs the important task of recognizing national categories
within a larger sociohistorical and economic frame that acknowledges the
past as well as contemporary and future-oriented frameworks. The papers
reorient the practice of migration to how transnational migrants engage in
online and offline representations and commoditizations related to their
transnational journeys, complicating both the idea of the nation and the
transnation in the process in their digital self-creations.


Mediatization, migration, transnationalism, social identity, digital
sociality
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