Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants' Transnational Everyday Lives and Media Use

by Claire Shinhea Lee University of Texas at Au

Overview

Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants’ Transnational Everyday Lives and Media Use examines the role of digital media in Korean visa-status migrants’ everyday lives in terms of their senses of home, belonging, and identity. Based on personal interviews with 40 migrants (temporary workers, academic students, and their dependents) living in Austin, Texas, Claire Shinhea Lee argues that the mundane use of homeland media brought by new media technology allows these migrants to make, connect to, and complicate home in their transnational space.

Through the theoretical framework of mediatization and transnationalism, Lee links a transnational polymedia environment and emerging digital culture (cord-cutting and algorithmic culture) to interrogate mobility and migration in the globalization era. The book reveals not only the multi-positionality within the transient migration but also the gendered structure of the visa system.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498598491
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Series:	Korean Communities across the World
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	6.23(w) x 9.38(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Claire Shinhea Lee received her PhD in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: From Diasporic Audience Studies to Digital Migration Studies

Chapter Two: Searching for Ontological Security in a Transnational Space

Chapter Three: Making Home Through Transnational Cord-Cutting Practice

Chapter Four: Connecting Home Through Smartphone and Algorithm Culture

Chapter Five: Complicating Home through Mediatization and Transnationalism

Chapter Six: Gendered Visa? Dependent Women’s Media and Home-Making

Editorial Reviews

Claire Shinhea Lee’s book offers a compelling examination of the mediatization of Korean transient migrants in Austin, Texas. In focusing on how temporary-visa status holders digitally make their everyday, emotional and transnational home and belongingness, Lee problematizes unilinear cultural assimilationist paradigms and binary understandings of mobility-stasis in migration. Contributing to emerging interdisciplinary scholarly debates on digital migration, the category of transience is proposed as an important innovative analytic lens to address how multiple positionalities including gender, class, nationality, visa-status, generation and age intersect and together co-shape identification and subordination of people on the move. This book is warmly recommended to media, communication, diaspora, migration, Korean, and journalism studies scholars and students looking to find rich ethnographic examples and theoretical tools to understand better how people negotiate living in our contemporary world which is increasingly shaped by both migration and mediatization.

Koen Leurs

Claire Shinhea Lee's "Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants' Transnational Everyday LIves and Media Use" provides an engaging analysis of the role and meaning of digital media in transnational lives. This book explores how temporary-visa-status migrants engage with digital media to connect with their homeland and negotiate their transnational everyday lives. Overall, it's compelling, empirical analysis and effective theoretical framwork make this book a useful addition to media, migration studies and Asian studies.

Pacific Affairs

With strong empirical evidence and a sophisticated theoretical framework, Claire Shinhea Lee has produced a compelling framework for understanding migration and ethnic bonds in times of mobility and new media technologies. While theorists of globalization have for some time written about space-time compression, more studies are needed to understand the complex phenomenological effects of such phenomena. Mediatized Transient Migrants fulfills this crucial role and does it by convincingly showing the role media technologies play in the re-constitution of home, in the fragile yet essential production of ontological security, and in the complex, ambiguous, and, at times, ambivalent restructuring of the affective world of Korean diasporas in the United States. This book is essential reading to anyone interested in grounded work on globalization, immigration, ethnic studies, new media, and Asian and Asian American Studies.

Hector Amaya