Call for papers: ECAS conference Panel: Youth Mobilities, Digital Technologies and Transnational Connections in Africa and the Diaspora
The next European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) will take place in Prague on 25-28 June 2025. Since the CfP is open for a few more days, this is a friendly reminder to please consider submitting a paper to our panel on digitally-mediated youth mobilities, networks and positionings (details below). The submission deadline is on 15 December 2024. Paper proposals can be submitted via this link.
Youth Mobilities, Digital Technologies, and Transnational Connections in Africa and the Diaspora
DISCPLINARY STREAM: Anthropology
THEMATIC STREAM: Afropolitanism and Afropean Belongings
ORGANISERS: Sarah Anschütz (the Netherlands; Belgium) & Ruth Cheung Judge (United Kingdom)
DISCUSSANT: Ebenezer F. Amankwaa (Ghana)
SHORT DESCRIPTION
This panel explores the ways in which digital technologies and media transform ‘non-crisis’ migrations and mobilities of African diaspora and African youth. Focusing on how the digital and embodied intersect, we invite papers on new digitally-mediated youth mobilities, networks, and positionings.
ABSTRACT
In transnational migration studies, digital technologies have primarily been understood as a way to connect those who leave and those who stay behind, and, more recently, as a key infrastructure of forced migration journeys. Yet recent technological developments in Europe and Africa mean that ‘the digital’ today has far greater repercussions for African, Afropolitan and Afropean life-worlds ‘on the move’. This is particularly the case for young people.
Bringing together research on youth in Africa and in the diaspora, this panel seeks to explore the intersections of ‘non-crisis’ youth mobilities and digital media to offer new insights into how the digital is not just a conduit for transnational connectivity, but a fundamental factor shaping the changing character of young people’s everyday lives and geographies: it shapes mobility practices and imaginaries, transnational engagements, and articulations of belonging. We are particularly interested in the ways that the digital is entangled with embodied practices and affective experiences, and the formation of new African/Afropolitan/Afropean networks through the digital. We invite papers that consider how technology usage is situated in specific contexts, and how global inequalities, class, gender, and other categories affect (im)mobility experiences. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: the ways digital mediation is reshaping youthful diaspora-‘homeland’ engagements; the role of smartphones during ‘non-crisis’ youth mobilities driven by leisure, ‘roots’, or economic endeavours; the interplay between hyper-connectivity, capitalism, and the character of youthful Afropolitanisms; the impact of everyday digital infrastructures and online communities in mobilising (imaginaries of) movement between Africa and Europe.