Digital placemaking and the datafication of forced migrants

The article conducts a conceptual discussion of digital placemaking practices related to forced migration. The literature has demonstrated that displaced people engage in digital placemaking to create belonging and to actualize aspirations. Simultaneously, state and suprastate actors expand digital data practices, which construct forced migrants as categories in digital place, thereby configuring their access to physical locations and to socio-legal positioning. This article argues that the digital data practices of both state and suprastate actors, such as biometric registration and metadata tracing, appropriate digital placemaking practices by forced migrants and dissect migrants’ subjectivity into data fragments that become agentic in shaping how the people access physical territory, identities, and resources. The article highlights opportunities for researching forced mobilities, place, and technologies. These opportunities include the study of nonhuman actors in placemaking processes, exploring the locus of agency in digital placemaking, and studying the intersections between embodied and digital placemaking practices.