Recent cases of migration to Europe have shown that smartphones and digital connectivity are not just a privilege of the happy few but easily accessible and affordable tools whose widespread use has changed not only the nature of migration but also the notion of communities, ethnic belonging, and cosmopolitanism (Leurs and Ponzanesi, 2018). We are talking today not of the disenfranchised but of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), a new citizen of the world, who is both rooted and routed (Gilroy, 1993), and whose global interactions are marked by the use of social networks (Chouliaraki, L., Georgiou, M. and Zaborowski, 2017. This allows physical distance to be bridged by digital proximity, creating new paradigms for the understanding of the affective turn online (Garde-Hansen, and Gorton, 2013; Pink, 2009). This significantly changes the experience of migration and the idea of connectivity. It also significantly reshapes the notion of citizenship because “while digital acts traverse borders, digital rights do not” (Isin and Ruppert, 2016, p. 70).

In this panel, we propose to interrogate how new forms of identity constructions, affective belongings, and citizenship are being renegotiated through the use of digital media (smartphones and social media platforms). We will explore how the construction of digital diasporas, new representational practices such as migrant selfies, and the claim to European belonging through insurgent, persistent, disruptive ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) are reconfiguring not only the notion of Europe and its borders but also forms of participation in the public sphere.