The Digital Literacy Practices of Newly Arrived Syrian Refugees: a Spatio-Visual Linguistic Ethnography

This doctoral research project is a visual linguistic ethnography that provides thick descriptions of newly arrived Syrian refugees’ smartphone-mediated digital literacy practices. The study investigates how three male newcomers to Leeds, Rojan, Aban and Mamoud, utilize mobile technologies and online resources, such as multilingual Facebook groups and smartphone applications, to instigate and support processes of settlement and belonging. To trace and interpret these quotidian mobile practices, prolonged and consistent engagement with my participants and their lifeworlds was required.
Thus, data collection concerning this ethnography took place over an in-depth ten-month period at various data collection sites. The multimodal and spatio-visual literacy practices that my key participants engaged with on their mobile devices were inherently diverse and complex to interpret. Here, the analytical lenses of capital and space have informed conceptualizations of how my participants’ digital literacy repertories within distinct mobile contexts relate to and interplay with settlement processes, such as obtaining a UK driving license or finding paid work in the formal and informal economy.
The dataset of this research project provides in-depth descriptions of how newly arrived refugees integrate smartphones into their everyday lives. Here, the findings of this study offer crucial insights into the interconnections between mobile technologies and settlement processes within this context of forced migration; the data analyses show how smartphones become key spatial instruments, which have the potential to impact and capitalize on the immediate physical spaces that my participants find themselves in and traverse through during their settlement trajectory, either by creating and joining translocal hybrid spaces, or by penetrating and transforming existing spaces.