Books by Koen Leurs
Edited volume
EVERYDAY FEMINIST RESEARCH PRAXIS. Doing Gender in the Netherlands
Everyday Feminist Research ... more EVERYDAY FEMINIST RESEARCH PRAXIS. Doing Gender in the Netherlands
Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. They provide a reflexive account of their research, and put into words what drives them.
The relation between theory and practice has been a key concern of feminist research in recent decades. The two domains are here not considered as oppositional, but rather contributors chart their interconnections and entanglements. The authors cover a wide topical area that includes, amongst others, digital representations of women movements; European homonationalism; fashion modelling and labour; sexual identities; child-birthing discourses; digital documentaries; fan fiction; and the post-human. As a whole, the interventions show how feminist research praxis remains crucial in critically disentangling naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched power relations and the revealing of contradictory and layered, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday feminist research praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.
HARDBACK
ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-6011-6
ISBN-10: 1-4438-6011-5
Date of Publication: 01/08/2014
MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/everyday-feminist-research-praxis
SAMPLE CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION AVAILABLE FOR FREE IN PDF FORMAT:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/61775
Media Matters Series, Jun 15, 2015
Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0.
Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections Increasin... more Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0.
Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections 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.
Journal articles by Koen Leurs
Media and Communication, 2019
Upon arrival to Europe, young adult gay migrants are found grappling with sexual norms, language ... more Upon arrival to Europe, young adult gay migrants are found grappling with sexual norms, language demands, cultural ex- pectations, values and beliefs that may differ from their country of origin. Parallel processes of coming-out, coming-of-age and migration are increasingly digitally mediated. Young adult gay migrants are “connected migrants”, using smartphones and social media to maintain bonding ties with contacts in their home country while establishing new bridging relation- ships with peers in their country of arrival (Diminescu, 2008). Drawing on the feminist perspective of intersectionality, socio-cultural categories like age, race, nationality, migration status, and gender and sexuality have an impact upon iden- tification and subordination, thus we contend it is problematic to homogenize these experiences to all young adult gay migrants. The realities of settlement and integration starkly differ between those living on the margins of Europe—forced migrants including non-normative racialized young gay men—and voluntary migrants—such as elite expatriates including wealthy, white and Western young gay men. Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews conducted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with young adult gay forced and voluntary migrants, this article aims to understand how sexual identification in tandem with bonding and bridging social capital diverge and converge between the two groups all while considering the interplay between the online and offline entanglements of their worlds.
Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization, 2018
Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special iss... more Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. The pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes Europe’s colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present. Of special interest is an essay by the late Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of Europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan Europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on Eurocentrism and universal values. In this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting Europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies.
International Communication Gazette, 2017
Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Ne... more Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital perfor-mativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.
Marking a decade of exciting interdisciplinary internet research, this is the 10th Information, C... more Marking a decade of exciting interdisciplinary internet research, this is the 10th Information, Communication and Society special issue that features research generated by the annual Association of Internet Research (AoIR) conferences. This issue consists of eight provocative articles selected from #AoIR2016, the 17th annual conference, held at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany from 5–8 October 2016. The #AoIR2016 conference theme Internet Rules! invited participants to address the complex interplay of digital technologies, business models and user practices. For some, the Internet rules! Others are ruled by the internet. Reflecting the emergent focus during the conference, this special issue addresses the Internet as a set of connected platforms that have various technical, social, cultural, political and figurative meanings, and seeks to understand rules as a set of normative values. Offering a primer on platform values, the contributions share a commitment to social justice, offer innovative theoretical interventions and empirically ground the workings of platform values from various scholarly perspectives. They show how normative digitally networked technologies are mutually shaped by top-down decisions such as the profit-oriented workings of algorithms that differentially value some users over others and bottom-up user practices that both sustain and subvert value-laden mechanisms.
Young Connected Migrants and Non-Normative European Family Life Exploring Affective Human Right Claims of Young E-Diasporas;
Volume 7 • Issue 3 • July-September-2016
In the face of the contemporary so-called “European refugee crisis,”’ the dichotomies of bodies t... more In the face of the contemporary so-called “European refugee crisis,”’ the dichotomies of bodies that are naturalized into technology usage and the bodies that remain alienated from it betray the geographic, racial, and gendered discriminations that digital technologies, despite their claims at neutrality and flatness, continue to espouse. This article argues that “young electronic diasporas” (ye-diasporas) (Donà, 2014) present us with an unique view on how Europe is reimagined from below, as people stake out a living across geographies. The main premise is that young connected migrants’ cross- border practices shows they ‘do family’ in a way that does not align with the universal European, normative expectations of European family life. The author draws on three symptomatic accounts of young connected migrants that are variably situated geo-politically: 1) Moroccan-Dutch youth in the Netherlands; 2) stranded Somalis awaiting family reunification in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and, 3) working, middle, and upper-class young people of various ethnic and class backgrounds living in London. Narratives shared by members of all three groups indicate meta-categories of the ‘migrant,’ ‘user,’ and ‘e-diaspora’ urgently need to be de-flattened. To do this de-flattening work, new links between migrant studies, feminist and postcolonial theory and digital cultures are forged. In an era of increasing digital connectivity and mobility, transnational families are far from deterritorialized – boundaries and insurmountable distances are often forcibly and painfully felt.
This article focuses on young Londoners' everyday digital connectedness in the global city and ex... more This article focuses on young Londoners' everyday digital connectedness in the global city and examines the urban imaginaries their connections generate and regulate. Young people engage with many mobilities, networks, and technologies to find their places in a city that is only selectively hospitable to them. Offline and online connections also shape urban imaginaries that direct their moral and practical positions toward others living close by and at a distance. We draw from a two-year study with 84 young people of different class and racial backgrounds living in three London neighborhoods. The study reveals the divergence of youths' urban imaginaries that result from uneven access to material and symbolic resources in the city. It also shows the convergence of their urban imaginaries, resulting especially from widespread practices of diversified connectedness. More often than not, young participants reveal a cosmopolitan and positive disposition toward difference. Cosmopolitanism becomes a common discursive tool urban youth differently use, to narrate and regulate belonging in an interconnected world and an unequal city.
Digital Multiculturalism in the Netherlands: Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Positioning by Moroccan-Dutch Youth
Abstract
This introductory review article develops an analytic-conceptual distinction between sp... more Abstract
This introductory review article develops an analytic-conceptual distinction between spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the present-day digitized urban condition. We reject a scholarly techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism dichotomy and argue that this triadic conceptualization can pave the way for a better understanding of the multiple, often contradictory and unpredictable implications of the fast-proceeding digitalization on cities and people who inhabit them. First, we discuss the intensified spectacularization from the perspective of labeling of cities as technologically advanced “smart” spaces and endeavors to enhance the attractiveness and ICT-glamour of urban public spaces. Next, we highlight two acute “ordinary sides” of living in digitally-mediated cities: the contributions of code-based software and digital media infrastructures to the routinized practices of urban life, and the escalation of the perceived standards of what constitutes “the ordinary” in the face of rapid technological change. Thirdly, we shed light on attempts at re-igniting street-level political agency, and the creation of outside-the-mainstream public spheres, via the aid of digital technology. In the end of the article, we consider how variable spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the media city are co-present in the following articles of this Special Issue.
The question of how we can live together with difference is more urgent than ever, now that more ... more The question of how we can live together with difference is more urgent than ever, now that more than half of the world’s population live in cities. For example, the majority of London’s inhabitants are ethnic minorities. Following Massey (2005), city dwellers negotiate a situation of intense “throwntogetherness,” as they live in the proximity of ethnic, racial, and religious others. Shifting the dominant focus of media and migration scholarship from transnational communication toward local everyday practices, this article develops the notion of digital throwntogetherness to chart relationships between geographically situated digital identifications and the urban politics of cultural difference and encounter. The argument draws from in-depth interviews with 38 young people living in Haringey, one of the most diverse areas in London, and builds on digital methods for network visualizations. Two Facebook user experiences are considered: transnational networking with loved ones scattered around the world and engagement with geographically proximate diverse digital identifications.
Special issue on Digital Crossings in Europe, Mar 2014
This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants ... more This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants stranded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia feel about staying in touch with loved ones abroad using Internet-based transnational communication. Left-behind during transit migration from Somalia to overseas, at this moment they can only digitally connect with contacts living inside for example dreamed diasporic locations in Europe. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group and concept maps drawn by informants the ambivalent workings of affects spurred by transnational communication are explored. The intense feelings of togetherness originating in Skype video-chat, mobile phone calls and Facebook use are conceptualized with the notion of transnational affective capital – one of the only sources of capital the informants have. The ambivalence of transnational affective capital is scrutinized by exploring whether such connectivity routines offer trust, enable anxiety management and promote ‘ontological security’. Alternatively, the question arises whether transnational communication may further exacerbate ontological insecurity: discomfort, unsettlement and increased anxiety related to the precarious situation of being stranded.
‘On digital crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond... more ‘On digital crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond the national and mono-ethnic focus. We argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances, opting for a comparative and postcolonial framework that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. Internet applications make it possible to sustain new forms of diaspora and networks, which operate within and beyond Europe, making issues of ethnicity, nationality, race and class not obsolete but transformed. It is therefore important and timely to analyse how these reconfigurations take place and affect everyday life. Using a critical approach to digital tools that avoids utopian notions of connectivity and borderlessness, this article highlights the dyssymmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity. It further introduces the different contributions to the special issue, making connections and tracing relations among themes and methods and sketching main patterns for further research. It also offers a panorama of other related studies and projects in the field, which partake in a critical reassessment of the enabling power of digital media and their divisive implications for new forms of surveillance, online racism and ‘economic’ inequality, which we gather under the heading of postcolonial digital humanities.
The domain of higher education – a space enacted at the nexus of knowledge production, spatial at... more The domain of higher education – a space enacted at the nexus of knowledge production, spatial attributes and embodiment - is not a mere mute, neutral and external backdrop of knowledge circulation and identification, but a distinct expressive culture filled with ideologies, hierarchies and politics. In this article we mobilize the notion of space invaders to acknowledge the everyday experiences of ethnicized and minoritezed students, exposing challenges and changes in educational institutions and knowledge domains. Transposing space invaders to the Dutch context we scrutinize ethnic, gendered and religious post-secular exclusionary norms these students experience in at Utrecht University, institutional strategies adopted for dealing with these invasions and the type of tactics ethnicized and minoritized students (migrant, ethnic minority and international exchange students) pursue in order to contest them. The dynamics experienced among the informants at Utrecht University reveal growing tension in the wider Netherlands higher educational system: the increasing emphasis on international competition, commercialization and privatization clashes with previously commonly held egalitarian ideas (Torenbeek & Veldhuis 2008; Reumer & Van der Wende, 2010)) on education as a uniformly accessible site for upward social mobility. The argument builds on empirical, ethnographic-inspired fieldwork among 40 students conducted in the context of the EU Framework 7 funded project Mig@Net: transnational digital networks,migration and gender.
Special journal issue `Introducing Media, Technology and the Migrant Family: Media Uses, Appropriations and Articulations in a Culturally Diverse Europe´, May 2013
"Generational and gendered specificities of digital technology use within migrant families remain... more "Generational and gendered specificities of digital technology use within migrant families remain understudied and undertheorized (Green & Kabir, 2012). Digital technologies are used among descendants of migrants to sustain and update networks while simultaneously they allow the younger generation to assert their individuality and circumvent gendered family norms. By analyzing generational specificities and gender negotiations apparent in the use of Internet applications among Moroccan-Dutch youth between 12 and 18 years old, two lacunas in the fields of migration and media studies are addressed. Findings stem from the Utrecht University research project ‘Wired Up: Digital media as innovative socialization practices for migrant youth’ (http://www.uu.nl/wiredup). In particular, the argument draws upon a large-scale survey, qualitative in-depth interviews and a virtual ethnography.
The empirical part consists of two case studies. In the first case study, the focus is on generational differences in digital technology use in Moroccan-Dutch families. In particular, generational aspects of transnational online networking, like instant messaging, Skype and social networking, are discussed. In the second case study, the focus is on the negotiation of gender relations within Moroccan-Dutch households. In particular, the analysis zooms in on gender relations discussed on online message boards. We argue that generational and gender relations are highly intertwined with each other."
This article focuses on digital practices of Moroccan-Dutch adolescents in the Netherlands. The d... more This article focuses on digital practices of Moroccan-Dutch adolescents in the Netherlands. The digital sphere is still rather understudied in the Netherlands.However, it offers a unique, entry to intersecting issues of religiosity, ethnicity and
gender as well as to their implications for thinking about multiculturalism from new vantage points. What do digital practices such as online discussion board participation tell us about identity and multiculturalism? The three forms of
position acquisition under discussion (gender, religion and ethnic positioning) show that neither religion, ethnicity, nor gender cease to exist in the digital realm but are constantly negotiated, reimagined and relocated. Drawing from the work
of Modood, Gilroy and other critics of gender, media, multiculturalism and postcoloniality, we argue that online activities of the Moroccan-Dutch youth not only offer an important critique of mainstream media debates on multiculturalism, but also create space for alternative bottom-up interpretations of everyday practices of multiculturalism in the Netherlands.
communicative spaces of their own: migrant girls performing selves using instant messenger software
In this article we argue how instant messaging (IM) is actively made into a communicative space o... more In this article we argue how instant messaging (IM) is actively made into a communicative space of their own among migrant girls. Triangulating data gathered through large-scale surveys, interviews and textual analysis of IM transcripts, we focus on Moroccan-Dutch girls who use instant messaging as a space where they can negotiate several issues at the crossroads of national, ethnic, racial, age and linguistic specificities. We take an intersectional perspective to disentangle how they perform differential selves (Wekker, 2009: 153) using instant messaging both as an `onstage' (Jacobs, 2003: 13) activity through which they express their communal, public and global youth cultural belongings and as a `backstage' activity through which they articulate their individual, private and intimate identity expression.
Instant messaging appears to be a space where they can strategically (re-)position themselves. The relationship between the online world of IM and the offline world is shown to be intricate and complex; at certain points, both worlds overlap and at others they diverge. Despite all existing constraints that are both related to gender restrictions, often disenfranchised family backgrounds, religious dictums, and surveillance by parents, siblings and peers, which affect Moroccan-Dutch girls in specific ways, IM is also understood as a unique space for exerting their agency in autonomous, playful and intimate ways.
M/C Journal, Jan 1, 2010
Postcolonial scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai have long been concern... more Postcolonial scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai have long been concerned with issues pertaining to diaspora and its relation to cultural production. These researchers have only rarely addressed the specificity of digitally mediated diasporic experiences of young migrants. We argue that the presence of migrant youth in the digital realm opens up new dimensions for our understanding of digital diasporas. In earlier research, we argue, diasporas were often singularly understood as a space and as a concept where diasporic people engaged in a vertical relationship with their homeland and in a horizontal relationship with the scattered community abroad, establishing transnational networks. In this article, we explore how young migrants online blur the clear directions of these diasporic affiliations, branding themselves at the crossroads of their ethnic roots and establishing new global routes in their contemporary digital environments. We acknowledge the medium specificity and figuration of hypertext and its particular aesthetics to consider migrant youth’ hybridized and multivocal expression of collectivity and individuality online.
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Books by Koen Leurs
Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. They provide a reflexive account of their research, and put into words what drives them.
The relation between theory and practice has been a key concern of feminist research in recent decades. The two domains are here not considered as oppositional, but rather contributors chart their interconnections and entanglements. The authors cover a wide topical area that includes, amongst others, digital representations of women movements; European homonationalism; fashion modelling and labour; sexual identities; child-birthing discourses; digital documentaries; fan fiction; and the post-human. As a whole, the interventions show how feminist research praxis remains crucial in critically disentangling naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched power relations and the revealing of contradictory and layered, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday feminist research praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.
HARDBACK
ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-6011-6
ISBN-10: 1-4438-6011-5
Date of Publication: 01/08/2014
MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/everyday-feminist-research-praxis
SAMPLE CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION AVAILABLE FOR FREE IN PDF FORMAT:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/61775
Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections 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.
Journal articles by Koen Leurs
This introductory review article develops an analytic-conceptual distinction between spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the present-day digitized urban condition. We reject a scholarly techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism dichotomy and argue that this triadic conceptualization can pave the way for a better understanding of the multiple, often contradictory and unpredictable implications of the fast-proceeding digitalization on cities and people who inhabit them. First, we discuss the intensified spectacularization from the perspective of labeling of cities as technologically advanced “smart” spaces and endeavors to enhance the attractiveness and ICT-glamour of urban public spaces. Next, we highlight two acute “ordinary sides” of living in digitally-mediated cities: the contributions of code-based software and digital media infrastructures to the routinized practices of urban life, and the escalation of the perceived standards of what constitutes “the ordinary” in the face of rapid technological change. Thirdly, we shed light on attempts at re-igniting street-level political agency, and the creation of outside-the-mainstream public spheres, via the aid of digital technology. In the end of the article, we consider how variable spectacular, ordinary and contested facets of the media city are co-present in the following articles of this Special Issue.
The empirical part consists of two case studies. In the first case study, the focus is on generational differences in digital technology use in Moroccan-Dutch families. In particular, generational aspects of transnational online networking, like instant messaging, Skype and social networking, are discussed. In the second case study, the focus is on the negotiation of gender relations within Moroccan-Dutch households. In particular, the analysis zooms in on gender relations discussed on online message boards. We argue that generational and gender relations are highly intertwined with each other."
gender as well as to their implications for thinking about multiculturalism from new vantage points. What do digital practices such as online discussion board participation tell us about identity and multiculturalism? The three forms of
position acquisition under discussion (gender, religion and ethnic positioning) show that neither religion, ethnicity, nor gender cease to exist in the digital realm but are constantly negotiated, reimagined and relocated. Drawing from the work
of Modood, Gilroy and other critics of gender, media, multiculturalism and postcoloniality, we argue that online activities of the Moroccan-Dutch youth not only offer an important critique of mainstream media debates on multiculturalism, but also create space for alternative bottom-up interpretations of everyday practices of multiculturalism in the Netherlands.
Instant messaging appears to be a space where they can strategically (re-)position themselves. The relationship between the online world of IM and the offline world is shown to be intricate and complex; at certain points, both worlds overlap and at others they diverge. Despite all existing constraints that are both related to gender restrictions, often disenfranchised family backgrounds, religious dictums, and surveillance by parents, siblings and peers, which affect Moroccan-Dutch girls in specific ways, IM is also understood as a unique space for exerting their agency in autonomous, playful and intimate ways.