Emotional practices of unaccompanied refugee youth on social media

Abstract

Migration for unaccompanied refugee youth is an emotionally complex process involving mediated experiences and expressions of emotions and affect. This article draws upon social media ethnography conducted with young refugees from African and Middle Eastern countries living in Europe. The participants’ emotional practices were explored through the multimodal analysis of content they shared on Facebook. The findings highlight how the young refugees performed multifaceted yet interconnected emotional practices. These emotional practices potentially assisted their negotiation of emotional losses and gains resulting from migration. The online mediated emotionality, however, cannot be fully comprehended through the reductionist lenses of binary oppositions such as losses and gains, presence and absence, or positive and negative emotions. This article shows that unaccompanied refugee youth’s experience and expression of emotions online are influenced by more than their migration experience, and that their interconnected nature and complexity need to be considered.