Affective Digital Media of New Migration From Turkey: Feelings, Affinities, and Politics

Abstract

This article explores how affective digital media spaces and practices can create affinities, give rise to collectivities, and facilitate possibilities of hope in difficult times. It addresses new migration from Turkey that has been prompted by the escalating political oppression, through its collective, public, and political feelings that are communicated, circulated, and archived on digital media. Underpinned by broader ongoing ethnographic research on affective spaces and collectivities emerging in the context of new migration from Turkey, this article focuses on a particular digital media space and collective, Kopuntu (Diaspora), which addresses affective experiences, including “negative” feelings, as sources for collective imaginations, actions, and hope. Invested with feelings that emerge from the entangled experiences of political oppression and migration, Kopuntu’s digital space is shaped and experienced as an affective place and archive; it opens a doorway to intimacies and affinities both within and beyond the context of new migration from Turkey and facilitates alternative formulations of diasporicity and collectivity, along with possibilities of hope, on the basis of common feelings rather than particular identities and places.