Technology-assisted analysis of home, border and belonging

MIGDIS, an interdisciplinary project funded by COALESCE Research Ireland (2025-2027), delivers an original and innovative understanding about how migrants experience “digital home” across virtual, public/border, and domestic spaces by integrating sociology and computer science, with fieldwork in Ireland and Turkey. The project is composed of four work packages, each advances an aspect of digital spaces in migration. Methodologically, MIGDIS combines digital ethnography, walking interviews, and photo-elicitation with privacy-preserving analytics (including differential privacy) to interrogate technology’s role in mobile, bordered and domestic homing. The team, composed of the PI, Co-PI, a postdoctoral fellow, and two PhD students (one acting as the research assistant), is producing key outputs that incorporates knowledge from social sciences and data analytics. One main output of the project will be safety-by-design guidance for smart-home technologies. Another is a comparative analysis of border/location-based surveillance.