Renegotiating family: Social media and forced migration

Abstract

Abstract The increasing, although uneven, trends of global connectivity and uptake of mobile devices have growing implications for local and transnational family relationships and activities. For refugees and their families separated by physical geography and conflict, social media platforms can effectively bridge, and at times collapse, the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Offering a range of audio-, video-, and text-based interaction, these platforms represent a portal to engage with transnational family. Drawing upon a digital ethnography of resettled refugees over the course of a year using online methods, this article examines how the general ubiquity of connective media in New Zealand has created opportunities for co-presence with overseas family and how this impacts close proximal relationships. This article explores these tensions—the possibilities for connection and co-presence alongside its associated challenges, burdens, and affective paradoxes—to unpack the implications, positive and negative, as to how resettled refugees living in New Zealand use social media to practise family.