Digital Diaspora 

Construction of Homeland through Digital Spaces: A Study of Indian Migrants in Germany (Funded by: Krea Research Fellowship 2020-2022)

Project Information: 

My project explores the Indian diaspora in the German host society to assess the role and impact of digital spaces in capturing the experiences of migration, construction of ‘home’ in the host society, maintaining diasporic network and reaching out to families and friends in the home country.

Introduction of smart phones in everyday lives of migrants has been a watershed in the history of media-migration interface. With gigantic proliferation of the digital world including social media, various ‘apps’ and new media platforms, digital networking has emerged as the latest pathway of social interaction especially for migrants as they are constantly juggling between home country and host society.

Presently, there are 169,602 Indians in Germany of which 108,965 are engaged in high-skilled jobs and 25,149 are students. This is exactly the profile of migrants I intend to explore in my project.

With the backdrop of websites like indernet and later toytowngermany and munichmela, this project will unravel media consumption patterns of the young Indian migrants in Germany manifested through their engagements with different apps, Facebook and twitter pages and whatsapp texts. As the ‘social glue’ of migrant transnationalism, this project will identify the reason for which these migrants use digital media, comparative usage patterns in terms of gender and migrant profiles, regional variations in digital media usage and exposure and different pathways of home-host interface emerging through these digital networks.

Consequently, I seek answers for three questions in this project:

How do digital media augment in integration of Indian migrants in the German host society? 

How do digital media facilitate the maintenance and proliferation of diasporic network of Indian migrants in Germany?

What is the role of digital public sphere in connecting Indian diaspora to its home country?

Seeking answers to these questions will enable me to envisage the future of digital diaspora of the Indians in Germany proliferated through the mediated images and media-consumption practices of the young Indian high-skilled migrants and university students in the Germany host society. Through the intervention of big data, I intend to estimate the mediascape emerging within the Indians diaspora in Europe in general and Germany in particular.