Abstract
Considering the increasing ubiquity of digital technology in people’s everyday life and particularly the emphasis on the digitalization of migration governance, scholars working in the field of media and digital migration studies argue that the use of mobile phones during and after the migration journey influences the whole migration experience.
This paper contributes to such work by focusing not only on the usage of such technologies but also on the processes of design, development, and implementation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany including in-depth interviews, document analysis, observations of mobile application use this paper follows different traces, that is developers and the process of design, municipalities and the process of implementation, social workers, and migrants and their navigation through the often confusing and complex terrain of state administration.
By this, the paper studies the relational entanglements of a mobile application infrastructure and critically analyses the impact of design, development, and implementation practices on migrants’ practices of usage and navigation – such as the selection and limitation of accessible information, not updated content, or the absence of app dissemination strategies. In this way, the paper goes beyond the rhetoric of mobile applications as enablers and supporters and critically discusses its ordering effects on migrants’ navigation practices.
Design, development, implementation and usage. Studying App infrastructures and their shaping of migrants’ practices of navigation
Olga Usachova (Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padua)
About the event series
STS-MIGTEC Circle is a small format which serves to reflect jointly on work-in-progress contributions related to the themes of interest to STS MIGTEC. The idea is to create a safe space for probing and experimenting with ideas, arguments, attempts of analysis, sense-making of empirical material. It’s the right space for you if you already invested substantial energy and dedication into that work, but you still feel the piece to be raw and fragile. We invite individual scholars – of all career stages – to take other interested scholars on board to jointly reflect and discuss with care and constructive feedback.