Making sense of the Internet in the diasporic space : “tactic digital Otherness” of Latin American migrant women in Granada

Abstract

The backbone of my research project is made of the linkages and intersections between the Internet,migration and sexual difference, with reference to a group of Latin American women living in Granada, Spain, and their relationships with computed mediated communication via the Internet. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, I have made interviews to track the perceptions, discourses and practices related to the Internet among these women, taking into account their differences in age, class, education and migratory wave, as intersectional variables that overlap and co-produce each other. My main research question is How do Latin American migrant women in Granada make sense of the Internet in inhabiting the diasporic space? In order to answer it, I have drawn on the theoretical framework provided by the interdisciplinary fields of Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience and Postcolonial studies. Thus this research proposes to practice a “located politics of technology” (Vehviläinen 2002:23), taking into account “the starting point of each group's concrete setting” (Ibidem) in everyday practices related to the Internet. This approach challenges technological determinism and quantitative readings on the study of Internet users as well as allowing for a deconstructive reading of key concepts such as information society and digital gap, from a gender perspective. Moreover it proposes alternative conceptualizations such as “tactic digital otherness” that values the productiveness of embodied and embedded differences.