Digital lives of precarities in migratory contexts

Benedicte Nessa is one of researchers involved in DigCapabilities and has a background in migration studies and social inequality, with particular interest in how structural conditions shape everyday life, belonging, and experiences of uncertainty among migrants and racialised minorities. Her work involves qualitative and critical perspectives on migration, precarity, and social relations across time and place.

The symposium brought together scholars working across sociology, migration studies, and critical social research to explore how different forms of insecurity and uncertainty shape the everyday lives of migrants and racialised minorities.

The symposium offered a space for in-depth discussions on precarity as a structural, situational, and often enduring condition—particularly for people living with migration-related vulnerabilities. Central to the event was a shared focus on time and temporality, and how experiences of waiting, uncertainty, disrupted life courses, and imagined futures shape belonging, agency, and social positioning.

As part of the symposium, Benedicte Nessa presented a joint paper with Gilda Seddighi and Rebecca L. Radlick (NORCE, Norwegian Research Centre) entitled The Digital Life of Precarious Belonging: NEET Youth with Migration Backgrounds in Norway. The paper examined how young people in Norway who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), and who have migration backgrounds, engage with digital media to craft—and contest—a sense of belonging under conditions of structural precarity and prolonged uncertainty.

Drawing on 13 narrative interviews with young people aged 16 to 29 who were born in Norway to immigrant parents, the paper explored how experiences of marginalization shape young people’s everyday digital practices and sense of belonging. F. Grounded in Anderson’s concept of imagined communities and Eriksen’s notion of precarious belonging, the analysis approached precarity not only as material insecurity, but as a relational, affective, and time-sensitive process in which past experiences and future imaginaries influence present digital practices.

The analysis focused on how young people who are marked as different through embodied, cultural and symbolic cues, and how these conditions structure their engagement with digital media. The findings show that digital spaces function as ambivalent arenas for negotiating belonging. Young people used social media, gaming platforms, and messaging apps to manage visibility, navigate racialized and gendered boundaries, and seek recognition, care and community when offline support was limited. At the same time, algorithmic filtering, exposure to hostility, and experiences of misrecognition often reinforced feelings of exclusion.

Across these arenas, the paper showed how digital practices can both ease and intensify relational precarity. Online encounters may offer alternative publics and low-threshold companionship, yet connections often remain fragile. Many participants described an everyday oscillation between connection and disconnection, reflecting the unstable conditions under which belonging is negotiated in digital environments.

The symposium featured keynote lectures by Professor Bridget Anderson (University of Bristol), Professor Vanessa May (University of Manchester), and Professor Catherine Degnen (Newcastle University), who provided critical reflections on belonging, temporality, and precarity across migratory contexts.