Call for submissions: Global Diaspora and Social Media, a special issue of Online Media and Global Communication. Deadline: 4 August 2025 (deadline extended to 30 September 2025).
Editors of the Special Issue:
Xi Cui (College of Charleston, USA)
Sumin Zhao (Edinburgh University, UK)
“Social media platforms play an essential role in the formation and maintenance of global diaspora communities, enabling dispersed members to maintain cross-border connections, negotiate collective identities, and mobilize around shared meanings and histories. This special issue builds upon foundational scholarship on digital diasporas while advancing new theoretical frameworks to understand contemporary social media practices among diaspora communities. We seek research that critically examines how social media mediates diasporic experiences through identity construction, political participation, language and culture preservation, and transnational social and economic exchanges. We encourage submissions that theorize the evolving relationship between social media and diaspora engagement in an era of platformization and rising anti-globalization sentiment and geopolitical tensions worldwide.
We are also interested in research exploring personal experiences of diaspora members, including the negotiation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ identities, emotional responses to separation and reunion, psychological well-being, and everyday social media practices. Studies investigating how emotions like nostalgia, hope, and belonging are articulated through social media, as well as research on how different platforms shape cognition and memory among diaspora individuals, will make valuable contributions.
The special issue aims to cover diverse methodological approaches that capture the complexity of diaspora social media communication, including (digital) ethnography, (critical) discourse analysis, quantitative survey, content analysis, as well as research utilizing computational tools. We particularly welcome mixed-methods research that combines these approaches to provide multidimensional perspectives on how social media is transforming diaspora experiences in transnational contexts. We also encourage works that explore diaspora communities that are understudied and underrepresented in current literature.”
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 