A (dis)connected homescape: The promise, limits, and paradox of migrants' homemaking practices in the digital age

This chapter offers a critical conception of migrant's home by illuminating the contradictory consequences of mobile communication on everyday and transnational homemaking practices. To begin with, we deploy a state-of-the-art literature review of digital homemaking practices among migrants, building also on our research on the digital practices of temporary migrant workers and international students in Melbourne, Australia. Through these approaches, we conceptualise the '(dis)connected homescape', capturing the mobile, intimate, paradoxical, and negotiated space for enacting a digitally-mediated home in a transnational context. On the one hand, digital media channels facilitate an intimate and networked space for migrants to enact familial ties, gendered relations, and household duties. On the other hand, digital media use stirs tensions and contradictory affective experiences. Migrants address these outcomes through disconnective practices to ensure the maintenance of transnational linkages. In sum, this chapter elucidates a critical take on portraying and investigating a migrant's ever-changing digital homescape.