Mediatized Transient Migrants

Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants’ Transnational Everyday Lives and Media Use examines the role of digital media in Korean visa-status migrants’ everyday lives in terms of their senses of home, belonging, and identity. Based on personal interviews with 40 migrants (temporary workers, academic students, and their dependents) living in Austin, Texas, Claire Shinhea Lee argues that the mundane use of homeland media brought by new media technology allows these migrants to make, connect to, and complicate home in their transnational space. Through the theoretical framework of mediatization and transnationalism, Lee links a transnational polymedia environment and emerging digital culture (cord-cutting and algorithmic culture) to interrogate mobility and migration in the globalization era. The book reveals not only the multi-positionality within the transient migration but also the gendered structure of the visa system.

This book explores the role of new media technology in transient migration in terms of mobility, national identity, and sense of home. Through 40 personal interviews with Korean migrants, Claire Shinhea Lee analyzes how homeland media in the transnational space helps migrants make, connect to, and complicate home.

This dissertation explores the role of new media in transient migrants’ everyday lives in terms of their senses of home and belonging. Transient migrants, while under-researched in favor of focusing on permanent migration, are important global subjects to study due to increasing mobility and its unpredictable contingency nowadays. At the same time, the development of new media technology enables migrants to participate in digital cultures of both home and host countries via diverse media such as mobile apps and Internet links. This study moves from text-oriented traditional audience research to study contemporary audiences who are dispersed and fragmented in their unique geographical and cultural environment. By interviewing 40 South Korean middle-class temporary visa-status migrants who have lived in Austin, Texas, for more than two years, my research links an emerging polymedia environment and transnational digital culture (cord-cutting practice and algorithmic/platform culture) to interrogate mobility and migration in the globalization era. Through applying the theoretical framework of ‘ontological security’ and ‘mediatization,’ I argue that the use of homeland media in the transnational space helps transient migrants to make, connect to, and complicate home. More specifically, the study finds similarities and differences among different visa categories—workers in specialty occupations (H1B, L1, OPT), academic students (F1), and their dependents (F2, L2, H4)—and analyzes not only their identity and belonging issues but also the gendered structure of visa categorization. As a result, the dissertation argues that the polymedia environment brought by new media technology in transient migration allows temporary migrants to feel a sense of home through providing ambient co-presence and sustaining ontological security in the midst of their unpredictable and precarious journey. By cutting the cord and dwelling in home country television contents and home country new media platforms and algorithm, transient migrants ironically revealed banal transnationalism and mediatization since those practices imperceptibly prolonged the temporary migration by alleviating some of the longings for homeland, breaking the nostalgic version of homeland, and building a strong diasporic community. Still, I suggest that mediatization and transnationalism are complex matters which require a consideration of multi-positionality within the transient migrants and a “non-media-centric” approach.

This book offers an understanding of the transient migration experience in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of communication and entertainment media. It examines the role played by digital technologies and uncovers how the combined wider field of entertainment media (films, television shows and music) are vital and helpful platforms that positively aid migrants through self and communal empowerment. This book specifically looks at the upwardly mobile middle class transient migrants studying and working in two of the Asia-Pacific's most desirable transient migration destinations - Australia and Singapore - providing a cutting edge study of the identities transient migrants create and maintain while overseas and the strategies they use to cope with life in transience.

In this comprehensive volume, leading scholars of media and communication examine the nexus of globalization, digital media, and popular culture in the early 21st century. The book begins by interrogating globalization as a critical and intensely contested concept, and proceeds to explore how digital media have influenced a complex set of globalization processes in broad international and comparative contexts. Contributors address a number of key political, economic, cultural, and technological issues relative to globalization, such as free trade agreements, cultural imperialism, heterogeneity, the increasing dominance of American digital media in global cultural markets, the powers of the nation-state, and global corporate media ownership. By extension, readers are introduced to core theoretical concepts and practical ideas, which they can apply to a broad range of contemporary media policies, practices, movements, and technologies in different geographic regions of the world—North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Scholars of global media, international communication, media industries, globalization, and popular culture will find this to be a singular resource for understanding the interconnected relationship between digital media and globalization.

"A revelation for digital researchers and a provocation for migration scholars... It introduces an insightful, inspiring, and inviting way of making sense of the messiness without losing hope of changing things." - Nishant Shah, Chinese University of Hong Kong "A must read for everyone who is concerned with questions of human mobility, media and communications and the digital border." - Myria Georgiou, LSE "A much-needed addition to scholarship on mobility, technology, and migration... The book is poised to become a touchstone text." - C.L. Quinan University of Melbourne In contemporary discussions on migration, digital technology is often seen as a ′smart′ disruptive tool. Bringing efficiencies to management, and safety to migrants. But the reality is always more complex. This book is a comprehensive and impassioned account of the relationship between digital technology and migration. From ′top-down′ governmental and corporate shaping of the migrant condition, to the ′bottom-up′ of digital practices helping migrants connect, engage and resist. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Digital Migration explores: The power relations of digital infrastructures across migrant recruitment, transportation and communication. Migrant connections and the use of digital devices, platforms and networks. Dominant digital representations of migrants, and how they’re resisted. The affect and emotion of digital migration, from digital intimacy to transnational family life. How histories of pre and early-digital migration help us situate and rethink contemporary research. The realities of researching digital migration, including interviews with leading international researchers. Critical yet hopeful, Koen Leurs opens up the unequal power relations at the heart of digital migration studies, challenging us to imagine more just alternatives. Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. All author royalties for this book will be donated to the Alarm Phone, a hotline for boatpeople in distress.

Newcomers and Global Migration in Contemporary South Korea: Across National Boundaries examines the intersections of race, class, gender and inequalities in global migration in contemporary South Korea. The contributors explore South Korean migration policies and study diverse migrants living and working in South Korea as low-wage undocumented workers, refugees, Korean returnees, migrant women married to Korean men, and white professionals. The chapters in this collection make visible the differentiation and divergence of migration experiences due to race, class, gender, and place of origin, which are all also mediated by local inequalities in South Korea.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

This edited volume unveils diverse issues and factors related to health disparities in contemporary Korean Society. It illustrates how economic and social changes unequally impact different subpopulations, including employees, the elderly, children, and immigrants and describes why health policy and intervention is needed now.

The 1.5 Generation Korean Diaspora: A Comparative Understanding of Identity, Culture, and Transnationalism provides insights into the contemporary experiences of 1.5 generation Korean immigrants around the world. By exploring Korean emigrants’ lives in host locations such as Los Angeles, Boston, Toronto, Auckland, Argentina, and Deluth, the contributors study the inherent complexities of being a 1.5 generation immigrant and show that 1.5 generation immigrants are a unique group that deserves further study. The contributors analyze key issues, such as the 1.5 generation’s identity negotiations, their occupational trajectories, the role of ethnic communities and institutions, changing values of love and marriage, the cultural tension involved in parenthood, their health needs and services, and ethnic and transnational entrepreneurship.