Afrocentric digital belonging: perspectives from black African young people in Australia

African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the highly racialised, criminalised and discriminatory experiences that shape the way that Black Africans experience belonging in Australia. We build on Kwansah-Aidoo and Mapedzahama’s (2018) typology of ‘Fractured Belonging ’ by exploring Black African young people ’ s digital practices and experiences of social media. To do this, we draw on a multi-method study with African young people in Australia (n=15), which used social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews to argue that African young people use social media to agentially craft and claim their own spaces of belonging. We suggest a typology - ‘ Afrocentric Digital Belonging’ - that involves three core processes: (re)cultivating identities and Black spaces; evoking boundaries; and forging digital and physical connections. We propose that through these core processes, digital spaces can offer new ways of navigating, contesting, (re)imagining and forging new understandings of belonging for Black African young people who live in predominantly white spaces.