Reflecting the Smartphone’s (Imagined) Affordances in Refugee’s Journeys

Abstract

The paper fosters the extent to which imagined affordances of smartphones help refugees to create meaning and thus maintaining a linearity/ continuity between their present, their past and their expected future. In doing so, the article is based on a social constructionist approach that expand the social construction of reality to include the digital level by reinforcing the necessity to rethink the implications of the digital for its basic concept of the social. In doing so, the article shed light to the importance of smartphones to construct or/and maintain a linearity between refugee’s past, their present and their future. Accordingly the results show, maintaining meaningful relations in the digital space and thus attributing meaning to their past and to their future helps refugees to bear the difficulties of the present. Smartphone thus offers new forms of agency to refugees during their experience of flight in constructing their mediated reality of meaningful relations connecting different temporalities.

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