The Mediation of Hope: Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances Within Iraqi Refugee Households in Jordan

Abstract

Worldwide, refugees are increasingly living in uncertainty for undetermined periods of time, waiting for an enduring legal and social solution. In this article, I consider how this experience of waiting is perceived through and influenced by the ubiquity of transnational digital connections, which play a central role in Iraqi refugee households in Jordan. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Iraqi refugees in Jordan’s capital Amman to further understand the use of digital technologies in everyday experiences of prolonged displacement. Waiting is an intrinsic affective phenomenon, colored by hope and anxiety. I argue that affective affordances—the potential of different media forms to bring about affects like hope and anxiety—enable Iraqi refugees to reorient themselves to particular places and people. As “no futures” are deemed possible in Jordan or Iraq, digital technologies serve as orientation devices enabling them to imagine futures elsewhere. Through the interplay of media forms, the Iraqi refugees refract their own lives via the experiences of friends and family members who have already traveled onward and who in their perception are able to rebuild a dignified life. Transnational digital connections not only provide a space for hope and optimistic ideas of futures elsewhere but also help to sustain one’s experience of immobility. I argue that using the imagination can be understood as an act of not giving in to structural constraints and might be crucial to making Iraqi refugee life in Jordan bearable.