Digital Passages

Increasingly, young people live online, with the vast majority of their social and cultural interactions conducted through means other than face-to-face conversation. How does this transition impact the ways in which young migrants understand, negotiate, and perform identity? That's the question taken up by Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0, a ground-breaking analysis of the ways that youth culture online interacts with issues of diaspora, gender, and belonging. Drawing on surveys, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, Koen Leurs builds an interdisciplinary portrait of online youth culture and the spaces it opens up for migrant youth to negotiate power relations and to promote intercultural understanding.

Koen Leurs is Associate Professor of Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme of the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Leurs was the principal investigator of the Team Science project Co-Designing a Fair Digital Asylum System, funded by the Universities of the Netherlands Digital Society program and COMMIT, a public-private ICT research community (2022-2023). He chairs the Utrecht University-wide Digital Migration Special Interest Group, part of the Governing the Digital Society focus area. He previously co-edited The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020) and the special issues (Im)mobile Entanglements (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023) and Inclusive Media Education for Diverse Societies (Media & Communication, 2022). His latest book is Digital Migration (Sage, 2023). For more information, see https: www.uu.nl/staff/KHALeurs.