Koen Leurs 
Digital Migration [PDF ebook] 

‘A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars… It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things.’


– Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong



‘A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border.’


– Myria Georgiou, LSE



‘A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration… The book is poised to become a touchstone text.’


– C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne



In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a ′smart′ disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex.



This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From ′top-down′ governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the ′bottom-up′ of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist.



Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores:

• The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication.


• Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks.


• Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted.


• The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life.


• How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research.


• The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers.

Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives.



Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.



All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress.

Tabla de materias

Chapter 1: Infrastructures

Chapter 2: Connections

Chapter 3: Representations

Chapter 4: Affects and emotions

Chapter 5: Histories

Sobre el autor

Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program of the Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Leurs is a digital migration studies scholar interested in digital practices of migrants and digital governmentality of migration. He combines mixed methods with creative, participatory and digital approaches. He is PI in the project ‘Co-Designing a Fair Digital Asylum System’ (2022–2023). He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Previously, he chaired the ‘Diaspora, Migration and the Media’ section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA, 2016-2021). Recently, Leurs co-edited the Handbook of media and migration (Sage, 2020) and special issues on ‘Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements’ for the International Journal of Cultural Studies (2023), ‘Digital migration practices and the everyday’ for Communication, Culture & Critique and ‘Inclusive media literacy education for diverse societies’ for  Media and Communication (2022). His previous monograph is Digital passages. Diaspora, gender and youth cultural intersections (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).