108th NCA Convention, New Orleans, LA. November 17-20, 2022.
“108th National Communication Association Convention” – New Orleans, LA – 17-20 November 2022. Samira Ibnelkaïd will give a talk titled “Translocality in the digital era: Empowerment and agency (challenges) of the hyper-modern migrant” and co-present a talk titled “Interrogating Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) for Racial Justice: Preliminary insights from a meta-synthesis of EMCA articles addressing race, racism, and ethnicity published between 2001-2020“.
The present contribution, rooted in an interdisciplinary framework (Multimodal Interaction Analysis, Visual Ethnography, Phenomenology), investigates the everyday digital practices of skilled migrants in Finland to both maintain bonds with relatives abroad and build bridges with their host community.
The title of “Happiest country in the world,” for the fifth time this year, makes Finland an attractive country for foreigners. Its immigration rate keeps increasing for both internal reasons (security, education system, openings in the labor market due to the low birth rate and the aging population, etc.) and external grounds (wars, persecutions, etc.). However, the integration process in the Nordic context is particularly challenging.
Therefore, I have been conducting a video-based qualitative study (in Oulu, Finland) involving 50 participants from 15 countries, resulting so far in a dataset of 30 hours of video-recorded social interactions and 10 hours of semi-structured interviews. This micro-analysis of locals and migrants’ daily (mediated) sociabilities underscores the sociocultural issues at play in the inclusion process and various ways in which digital technologies can help them tackle these challenges and gain agency and empowerment.
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