Taking stock of media activist initiatives in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, this article discusses findings from case study research informing the media education platform “diraya.media.” Through participatory methodology, the case studies and the bilingual (Arabic/English) website aim to analyze and strengthen local media literacy pedagogies by learning with and from media activists in the region. This article reports on six case studies of SWANA-based media activist organizations and pedagogical material for the media literacy classroom. The goal is to reflect and discuss the methodological and theoretical ramifications of Diraya as a pedagogical space for reflection and knowledge exchange between media activists and other learners in the region and beyond. Drawing on the participating activists’ experiences, Diraya is embedded in the turn toward radical media education and civic media literacies, contributing to (1) de-Westernizing media literacy education, (2) creating more learning materials based on local activist knowledge as important resources to increase media literacy, and (3) enabling of long-term collaborations by archiving and making public experiences from SWANA-based media activists.

Les fantasmes visant à ordonner, à gérer et à restreindre dans l’espace et dans le temps les corps réfugiés par des infrastructures migratoires ne sont pas nouveaux et puisent dans une longue tradition historique. L’analyse d’archives des camps de réfugiés au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale révèle le rôle des infrastructures médiatiques dans la création, le maintien et l’évolution de pratiques administratives relatives au statut de réfugié. Ainsi, l’utilisation de médias se trouve au cœur des mécanismes de la gestion technologique des « crises » migratoires.

While infrastructures of media and of migration currently converge in specific ways, in this commentary, we consider how these infrastructures always reflect distinctive moments in media history, as well as in migration history. An archaeological approach to infrastructure posits that media infrastructures do not spring into action fully formed, and neither is there ever a moment when they would be fully formed. We propose the perspective of deep time of infrastructures as a way of opening up unresolved questions about what critical researchers can and should do with historically-informed inquiry of media technologies across migration contexts. We specifically operationalize the deep time of media and migration infrastructures by addressing the three dimensions of: (1) materialities; (2) practices; and (3) imaginaries.

Contemporary migration infrastructures commonly reflect imaginaries of technological solutionism. Fantasies of efficient ordering, administrating and limiting of refugee bodies in space and time through migration infrastructures are distinctive, but not novel as they draw on long historical lineages. Drawing on archival records, we present a case-study on post-World-War-II refugee encampments. By highlighting the deeply historical role of media in migration governance, i.e. the act of mediation through technological infrastructuring, we seek to bring together the fields of migration studies and media studies. We argue that this cross-fertilization helps to historically untangle power dimensions, inherent workings, as well as human experiences imbued in the tech-based management of migration ‘crises’. Uncovering historical underpinnings of digitalized asylum regimes through the prism of media infrastructures, and socio-technical imaginaries surrounding them, points at continuities and genealogies of containing and managing people in time and space, reaching into technologies of colonial and fascist projects. We thus seek to explore the assumptions that drive the build-up of migration and media infrastructures: How are migrants, camps, media and their infrastructural interrelations imagined? Which cultural horizons are reflected in technologies, which functions are imagined for whom, and how are utilitarian ideas about humanitarianism and migration control embedded?

This chapter explores mobile socialities and media practices in the context of refugee camps in post-war Germany (ca. 1945-1960). In refugee camps, forcefully mobilised individuals are forcefully immobilised, making the camp into an institution, where national-territorialist imaginaries of belonging and disbelonging are negotiated - through controlling (im)mobility and respective socialities. Based on archival material from post-war German shelters, this chapter explores these paradoxical workings of mobilisation and immobilisation in forced migration processes. To do so, media practice theory serves as an analytical prism to observe socialities enacted in and around media, which make up experiences of mobility and immobility. The material here points at three dimensions of media practices, shaping mobile socialities: socio-material immobilisation through the set-up of physical spaces, creating forced sociality as well as encapsulation and segregation; media technological environments and repertoires in camps, enabling and controlling communication and connectivity; and mobilising media and communication practices of resistance, activism and protest among camp residents. This variety of camp-based media practices provides a historical perspective on how practices around media shape a spectrum of both mobile and immobile socialities and anti-socialities. Apart from counteracting a rhetoric of newness often found in accounts of mobile media and digital communication, such historicizations of media practices in camps, ultimately, lead us to preceding articulations of socialities and anti-socialities, where mobility and immobility have been negotiated and imagined in an extreme counter-space at the margins of society, which always reflects its utopian ideas of inside and outside. 

This dissertation explores media practices in and of refugee camps. In the wake of forced migration becoming ever more digitized both in its experiences and its governance, this thesis historicizes media practices in refugee camps as a space of the refugee regime. In various historical contexts in Germany after 1945, this study analyses archival material in order to trace media practices in the making of refugee camps’ space, time, and politics, and thereby provides historical insights into circularities, ruptures, and continuities of media practices and their entanglement with being and being made a refugee. 

Refugee camps spatialize the modern “refugee regime” (Betts, 2010) as a hegemonic mode of governing forced migration. Being paradoxical tools of both shelter and humanitarian relief and at the same time segregation and exclusion, refugee camps are “heterotopian and heterochronic spaces” (Foucault, 1967/1997): othered, paradoxical spaces and times, simultaneously inside and outside of society, a temporary limbo, withholding outcasts from nation-based, bordered societies while at the same time constituting these very societies.

The holistic concept of media practices (Couldry, 2004) describes how social practices of mediation and communication enable, shape, and condition socialities and materialities of the refugee camp: media as enabling environments, technologies, and techniques (Peters, 2015) construct, negotiate, and make the camp’s heterotopian and heterochronic condition. By way of media practices, camp residents, staff and authorities, NGOs and governments as well as activists, establish, maintain or alter the social relations of the camp heterotopia and heterochronia. Relating to the space, time, and politics of the camp, these media practices are conceptualized as heterotopian, heterochronic and heteropolitical media practices, which shape and negotiate the differentiation, other-ness and paradoxical inclusions and exclusions from time and space, which refugee camps thrive on.

Archival records from the post-war period of ca. 1945 to 1960, and the 1980s and 1990s, provide traces of historical media practices from camp residents, authorities within the refugee regime, and activists and other communities. Three analytical chapters explore heterotopian, heterochronic and heteropolitical media practices. Firstly, heterotopian camp space is produced, governed and controlled through media practices around media infrastructure, such as architecture, media-technological equipment, and administrative practices. Secondly, refugee camps are heterochronic limbos with multiple ruptured temporalities that are managed through media practices of memory and witnessing. Thirdly, heteropolitical media practices are forms of altering and challenging the othering politics of the camp space and camp time through forms of resistance and protest.

This thesis re-evaluates historical media practices in and of the refugee camp from the perspective of the digitized refugee regime and experience, and showcases trajectories of media practices that (regardless of media technological environment) have been employed in projects of negotiating and coping with being and being made a refugee. This thesis thereby challenges a rhetoric of newness around digital technologies and contributes theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically to the study of media and migration. By pointing out the complicitness and existentiality of media practices in making, differentiating, and relating space, time, and politics in bordered states, the thesis ultimately argues for an approach to media studies from the margins to help understand how seemingly peripheral spaces mirror and co-construct media practices in society more generally.

Denna avhandling utforskar mediepraktiker i och som flyktingläger. I kölvattnet av en allt mer digitaliserad tvångsmigration, dess reglering och de erfarenheter den ger upphov till, avser denna avhandling att historisera mediepraktiker i flyktingläger. Studien analyserar arkivmaterial ur olika historiska kontexter i Tyskland efter 1945, för att spåra mediepraktikers roll i skapandet av flyktinglägrens tid, rum och politik. Därmed ger avhandlingen en historisk inblick i mediepraktikers cirkulering, avbrott och kontinuitet och på vilket sätt de är en del av tillståndet av att vara och bli gjord till flykting. 

Flyktingläger förrumsligar den moderna ”flyktingregimen” (Betts, 2010) som ett hegemoniskt sätt att styra och reglera tvångsmigration. Flyktingläger är paradoxala verktyg som ger skydd och humanitär hjälp samtidigt som de segregerar och stänger ute. Därför är flyktingläger att betrakta som ”heterotopiska och heterokroniska rum” (Focault, 1967/1997). De är ”det andra”, motsägelsefulla i tid och rum, på samma gång innanför och utanför samhället; en tillfällig limbo som håller kvar de som blivit utestängda från nationalstaternas avgränsade samhällen samtidigt som de på samma gång skapar och bekräftar dessa samhällen. 

Teoretiskt utgår avhandlingen ifrån mediepraktiker, ett holistiskt begrepp som utgår ifrån mediering och kommunikation som sociala praktiker (Couldry 2004), som möjliggör, formar och upprätthåller flyktinglägret både socialt och materiellt. Den utgår också från medier som möjliggörande miljöer, tekniker och teknologier (Peters, 2015) som konstruerar, förhandlar och skapar lägrets heterotopiska och heterokroniska tillstånd. Mediepraktiker hos lägerboende, personal, myndigheter, organisationer och aktivister etablerar, underhåller och alternerar de sociala relationer som utgör flyktinglägret som heterotopi och heterokroni. Genom att relatera dessa praktiker till lägrets tid, rum och politik, konceptualiseras flyktinglägrets mediepraktiker som heterotopiska, heterokroniska och heteropolitiska mediepraktiker, som formar och förhandlar den differentiering, annan-het och de motsägelsefulla in- och exkluderingar i tid och rum som utgör flyktinglägrets förutsättningar. 

Arkivmaterial har samlats in från tiden omkring 1945 till 1960 samt från 1980- och 1990-talet. Materialet har samlats in från institutionella arkiv samt community-arkiv som tillhandahåller spår av historiska mediepraktiker från lägerboende och myndigheter, liksom från aktivister och andra gemenskaper och organisationer. Tre analyskapitel utforskar heterotopiska, heterokroniska och heteropolitiska mediepraktiker i flyktingläger i Tyskland efter 1945. Analysen visar för det första att heterotopiskt lägerutrymme produceras, regleras och kontrolleras genom mediepraktiker som rör medieinfrastruktur, till exempel arkitektur, medieteknisk utrustning och administration. För det andra är flyktinglägret ett heterokroniskt limbo med avbrutna temporaliteter, som hanteras genom mediepraktiker som minne och vittesmål. För det tredje innebär heteropolitiska mediepraktiker, i former av motstånd och protester, en möjlig förändring och utmaning av den politik som konstitutionerar lägret som ”det andra”.

Denna avhandling omvärderar historiska mediepraktiker i och som flyktingläger, med utgångspunkt i en digitaliserad flyktingregim och de erfarenheter den ger upphov till. Avhandlingen visar på genealogier av mediepraktiker som, oavsett medieteknologisk miljö, har använts i olika situationer för att förhandla och hantera ett tillstånd av att vara och att göras till flykting. Därmed utmanar avhandlingen den retorik som framställer digitala teknologier som nya, och bidrar teoretiskt, empiriskt och epistemologiskt till fältet för medie- och migrationsstudier. Genom att peka på mediepraktikers roll i skapandet, särskiljningen och sammanbindningen av tid, rum och politik i gränsbaserade stater, argumenterar avhandlingen för en medievetenskap från marginalerna för att bidra till en förståelse för hur till synes perifera platser speglar och med-konstruerar mediepraktiker i samhället i stort.