About this Research Topic

Background

Human mobility and migration have been omnipresent in the history of civilizations, yet the significance and patterns of mobility and migration have been changing over recent decades. Over time, mobility as a concept has allowed for investigation of movement of people in connection to material, ideal, and virtual flows, and embraced the manifold connections of these different forms of flows and processes. Paths of migration, on the other hand, often reflect global historical trajectories (e.g., deriving from imperialism and colonialism), and their histories and present forms are central to the making of narratives, memoirs, and archives. Such global historical trajectories often impact locally and inflect mobile people’s experiences of structure, agency, and identity negotiations during pre- and post-movements.

Over the last decade, the digital humanities field has increasingly engaged with the analytical possibilities of using computational approaches to study migration. Digital devices and their usage – such as mobile phones and web applications, GIS, remote sensing and satellite images, social media, event and news databases, and financial databases – have been a focus for social scientists and humanities scholars to gain new knowledge of migration, and to be equipped with new quantitative and qualitative tools of inquiry.

The dynamic intersection of mobilities, migration, and digital humanities that is the focus of this Research Topic gives a timely opportunity for scholars from diverse disciplines to engage in critical discussions, explore innovative methodologies, and share their research on these interconnected themes, in global contexts.

This Research Topic aims to connect digital humanities with emerging sociological discourse and scholarship around big and thick data, data integration, visual sociology, and viewing core digital humanities concepts such as (digital) archives as ethnographic sites and through other sociological lenses. The digital environment features at the core of our conception of questions around mobilities and migrations in this Research Topic. Our goal in this Research Topic is multifold: Examining mobility and migration dynamics through data integration and analysis (e.g., insights gained from bringing together studies of physical mobility and digital space/digital technologies such as through digital trace data or digital footprint data); adopting digital lenses in studying migrant trajectories and experiences of im/mobility (such as understanding social world of migrants through social media); and examining emerging ‘regimes’ of migration and mobility within and across digital spaces that enable new strategies and tactics of containment, fugitivity, and relocation (e.g. ‘regimes’ often explicitly refer to pressure points and movements across multiple geo-social scales where intersectionalities are constantly negotiated and redefined via changing subjectivities). As such, we adopt a broad aperture to understanding migration, as both a voluntary and involuntary practice brought on in response to a variety of environmental factors, including sociopolitical, natural, economic, geographic, and architectural climates that facilitate and inhibit various kinds of im/mobility and result in new forms of culture. These dynamics, both virtual and physical, can be analyzed with digital humanist methods to reveal novel cultural patterns and render migratory social forms as intelligible to scholarship. The digital turn and its allied dynamics have significantly necessitated that we reimagine these fundamental sociological ideas (of mobility and migration) that run through the fabric of global and local societies.

We welcome scholars from various humanities and social science areas to submit original research articles on, but not limited to, anthropological inquiry, human geography, digital humanities, and sociological examinations including areas of computational social science, on the following (but not limited to) themes as they relate to migration, mobilities, and digital humanities:
• Data Integration and Analysis
• Digital Activism and Advocacy
• Digital Archives as Ethnographic Sites
• Digital Narratives
• Gender and Sexuality
• Heritage
• Historical Perspectives
• Im/mobilities, Inequalities, and Intersectionalities
• Literature of Migration
• Mobilities and Borderlands
• Reflexivities
• Social Mobilities
• Spatial Mobilities
• Technology and Mobilities (e.g., interoperability).

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Review

Keywords: Inequalities, Intersectionalities, Data Integration, Data Analysis, mobilities, migration, digital humanities

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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