Chapter 8: Mobile Technologies and Forced Migration

This chapter adopts a comprehensive approach to examine the role of mobile technologies for belonging and survival among forced migrants in transit who inhabit ‘techno-border-scapes’. It integrates the literature on state surveillance, digital activism and digital humanitarianism. Forced migrants in Calais live outside conventional forms of protection and assistance at the French-UK border. For them mobile phones are multi-functional devices and life-saving tools that intersect with all dimensions – practical, affective, economic, social and political – of their lives. They are enabling but also constraining devices that produce digital inequalities.