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Extant research has discussed visibility and the affordances of new technologies for the strategic self-representation of migrants. This study introduces becoming as a way of understanding how forced migrants manoeuvre their lives under conditions of physical and social arrest. Becoming is a process through which people shift between different moments and ways of being and relating while responding to historical, sociopolitical and economic realities and moving towards new ways of acting in the world. New technologies play a role in this process. Based on three years of fieldwork with people seeking asylum in Germany, the article discusses how people became perceptible and imperceptible through technologically mediated sociality in the form of self-presentation, co-presence and political mobilization. The article concludes that virtual practice enables ways of knowing and relating for forced migrants that challenge concepts of border through information sharing, transnational grouping and political learning.
Saskia Witteborn (Mon,) studied this question.