Performing closeness: Al-ghurbah and co-presence in Syrian refugee women’s vernacular media

Abstract

This ethnographic case study focuses on newly resettled refugee women from Syria to the greater Houston, Texas area and how they used smartphone technology and various social media platforms to navigate the resettlement process between 2015 and 2018. They arrived at a critical time in the United States, just having acquired refugee status and resettling in Houston at the end of the Obama era. Trump era immigration policies (known as The Muslim Ban) denied immigration and asylum from majority Muslim nations. This participatory ethnographic study examines how, under the harshest circumstances, newly arriving refugees relied on smartphones, social media platforms and digital networks to create and perform a new collective community while remaining close to displaced family members. Technological engagement and polymediated experiences are examined through the lens of co-presence, gender performativity and visual media studies and how mobile technology helped engender a new vernacular space outside of and in opposition to nativist discourse. Their transnational caregiving and emotional labour and its digital footprints are the very architecture of emerging social networks, space building, and community cohesion. Mobile technology creates new forms of connectedness, constant contact and co-presence, a state wherein people attempt to overcome physical separation anxiety by performing, reproducing and inventing new forms of ambient polymedia environments, or, forms of digital communications that blur conventional notions of presence and distance. The question here is how the rupture of displacement might drive technology usage to continually expand the ways humans connect, and more importantly, how they find new ways to feel more connected.