On 19 November, NOG PhD Claudia Minchilli will defend her thesis Localizing Digital Diasporas: Diasporic Digital Networking Among Somali, Romanian and Turkish Women Through the Lens of Social Class. In her dissertation, Claudia investigates the diasporic digital practices of Somali, Romanian and Turkish migrant women living in Rome with a particular focus on the interrelation with social class dynamics and forms of social stratification from a gender perspective.
Her intervention aims at showing how looking at digital practices from an intersectional and local perspective that is sensitive to social class dynamics provides a vantage point for understanding the emergence and articulation of specific forms of digitally-led diasporic sociality on a local level. This study intervenes in the scholarly field of digital diaspora studies by offering a different and critical perspective on how to approach, epistemologically and methodologically, the study of diasporic subjects’ networking, which is enhanced by the use of digital media. Her epistemological approach to the study of digital diasporas is influenced by feminist and postcolonial theories on migration and diaspora studies and sensitive to the analysis of contextual power dynamics as they act within the field of diaspora space. She shows, indeed, how contextual power relations – and migrants’ positioning in relation to them – are implicated along the online–offline continuum in the process of migrants’ identity formation, community-making and in the articulation of a sense of belonging in a context of displacement.
Details PhD Defense
Date: Friday November 19, 2021
Time: 14.15-15.15
Location: Due to Covid-19 the PhD defense is hybrid. You can follow the ceremony through this livestream.
Title: Localizing Digital Diasporas: Diasporic Digital Networking Among Somali, Romanian and Turkish Women Through the Lens of Social Class
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi and Dr. Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University, US)
Co-promotor: Dr. Domitilla Olivieri
