Refuge(e)s in the Digital Diaspora. Reimagining and Recreating Ethnically Cleansed Villages as Cyber Villages

Abstract

Based on digital and conventional ethnography, this paper discusses how Bosnian refugees utilize digital technologies and new media to recreate, synchronize and sustain their identities and memories in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing and genocide and in the contexts of their new emplacements and home-making practices in the diaspora. In addition to discussing representations of displacement and emplacement in the “digital age”, the paper also aims to make a contribution to the understanding and application of digital ethnography as an emerging method of inquiry in anthropology and related social science and humanistic disciplines. While some researchers see digital ethnography as a form of research based exclusively online, it is also crucial to understand the online world in the context of the real world – made of real people, places and social relations.