Mediatized Transient Migrants

Book excerpt: 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.