Trust Building and Future Construction via Smartphones and Social Media at intermediate Locations of Transnational Migration with the Example of Refugees from East Africa

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Schönhuth, since 1/2023
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422709975

Many refugees spend much of their migration process at transit places, such as refugee camps, where their mobility and freedom are restricted. At the same time, today's migrants have access to mobile communication technologies such as smartphones and online platforms which have a boundary expanding effect. This connection between mobility (people in motion) and location-relatedness (people at places), and smartphones as mobile tools or social media as boundary expanding spaces of information and imagination shall be empirically investigated in this form for the first time in relation to the processes of future construction and trust building. Using a media-ethnographic approach, which links personal migration biographies with individual and collective media practices and cultures, the project intends, with the example of an East African refugee camp, to focus on three perspectives of the inhabitants’ future perspectives: That of a possible onward journey to target places and places of longing (Europe/North America), that of a possible break-off/discontinuation and the return to the place of origin, and finally the prolonged stay in the partly city-like structures of the refugee camps. In further empirical steps, at the end of the first funding phase, selected places of origins of the research partners shall be visited to capture/include the perspective of those who were left behind, and in the second funding phase the further course of the migration biographies of the research partners shall be followed up. Particular attention is paid to the social network relationships/relations that have been established or maintained in this process (locally in the camp, virtually beyond that) and the question of how trust is established / negotiated, or what is communicated, when and on which network channels. On-site field research will be supported by online research and the collection and analysis of the platforms and networks used. With the extension of the concept of trust and future beyond a historical-western discourse, we also explicitly focus on specific anthropological results for the social pedagogical, linguistic and sociological research projects with which this project is applied for together.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Claudia Böhme, until 12/2022