What happens to remittances, an important feature of the global financial system, when a pandemic strikes? Despite early predictions of significant drops in volumes, flows have been affected less than expected. This commentary explains that this outcome is attributable in part to a renewed focus on the infrastructure of global finance and an accelerated development and use of digital solutions, but that it is mostly a result of the individual efforts and resilience of migrants.

This introduction contextualizes thirteen papers included in the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special collection examining the interrelationships between media, migration, and nationalism. This collaborative project was initiated during the Media, Migration and the Rise of Nationalism seminar held in Tokyo in 2018. The seminar was organized around the themes of cosmopolitanism, migration control, transnationalism, and contact zones. This selection covers and brings together long-standing and unresolved debates, which will allow media and migration researchers to engage in a multiperspectival reconsideration of how politics, mobility, and mediation intersect and co-shape each other. In this article, we first position ourselves in relevant debates by charting implications and shared characteristics underlying the recent economic crisis, climate crisis, refugee crisis, and COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 of the article focuses on cosmopolitanism. This thorny scholarly debate is captured by the artist Takashi Tanihata in the works A Letter That Isn’t Read I and II . As we discuss, the artworks depict an endless loop of (mis)communicating goats, which represent the possibilities and implications of mediated solidarity and polarization. The special collection features three articles that further nuance the heated debates on the politics of representation and mediation in relation to cosmopolitanism. Section 2 of this article is thematized with a painting by the artist XX titled The Scents on the Borders , which depicts perfume bottles and their scents encountering each other. The work, as we argue, refers to the complex, evolving relationships between border-crossing subjects and technologies of migration management and control. A latest development shows how tech-driven surveillance experiments tap into sensing technologies including those related to the sense of smell to secure borders. The section consists of four articles that demonstrate how the politics of material and symbolic bordering proliferates outside and inside nation-state boundaries. Section 3 takes inspiration from an artwork titled The Vision (Reportage) , by Motoi Hirata, which features a violet sea snail as a motif to represent migrants and diaspora groups in terms of transnational connectivity. The section includes three articles that analyze the workings and lived experiences of connectivity and transnationalism across nation-state borders. In section 4 of this article, we take cues from Satsuki Hinokimoto’s abstract painting The Spread and link its deployment of isolated and interacting colored concentric circles to the evocative scholarly concept of the cultural contact zone. This section of the issue consists of three articles that focus on migrant encounters with difference and the politics of integration in various urban settings across the world. Finally, in our conclusion, we advocate for media and migration researchers to take up the critical concept of intersectionality to better acknowledge the internal heterogeneity of migrant communities alongside the similarities and differences among migrant communities in tandem with various interacting axes of agential identification and structural forms of oppression.

This article interrogates new forms of digital cosmopolitanism(s) by introducing a critical postcolonial framework that allows an investigation of how digital connectivity operates in the everyday lives of migrants. We are talking today not of the disenfranchised but of the “connected migrant” (Diminescu 2008), a new citizen of the world, who is both rooted and routed, and whose global interactions are marked by the use of social networks. This allows physical distance to be bridged by digital proximity, creating new paradigms for the understanding of the affective turn online, which significantly changes the experience of migration and the idea of connectivity. Yet the ubiquity of digital connectivity does not mean an end to social inequalities; it can lead to new forms of isolation and radicalization for subaltern subjects. New forms of datafication, biometric assemblage, and algorithmic culture have intensified the ways in which bodies and identities can circulate across and beyond borders, heightening the speed of connectivity and circulation. Despite and because of these new technological innovations, many bodies remain stuck in space and kept on hold. The undesired effects of function creep, data leaks, and biometric sorting lead to discriminatory practices that put the notion of digital cosmopolitanism in jeopardy, reactivating old, long-standing forms of colonial practices and surveillance, but now in the form of data extraction and biometric categorizations. A postcolonial intervention into the notion of digital cosmopolitanisms is therefore needed in order to chart the reproductions of power asymmetries, by focusing, for example, not only on digital voices from below but also on the everydayness of cosmopolitanism and on the banal ways of engaging with digital connectivity and transnational belonging. This article is part of the Global Perspectives Communication and Media special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

This paper focuses on virtual reality (VR) engagements of migration in reference to the Girardian notion of mimetic desire and the embedded notion of rivalry, which are considered as informing possibilities for intimacy in virtual worlds. Possibilities for intimacy, in terms of turning to another and transcending the conditions of one’s existence, are here considered as becoming transformed by the digital. VRs subjected to analysis, by means of virtual cartography, consist of The Displaced (2015) and The Fight for Falluja (2016), produced by the New York Times . I argue that, while expressing something that cannot really be talked about is specifically enabled by discursive, affective, and corporeal experiences of VR, “the unspoken” at the same time eliminates the possibility of transcendence for various subjects involved in the making of a “reality.” The “political” in VR most visibly manifests itself in terms of rivalry over how to attain and behold the desirable, which becomes normalized beyond mores; inequalities thus produced are not rendered as constituting an injustice to any significant degree. This article is part of the special issue “Media, Migration, and Nationalism” of the journal Global Perspectives , Media and Communication, guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.