Living across Connectivity: Intimacy, entrepreneurship and activism of East Asian Migrants online and offline

The project is related to edited volume publication '' Living across Connectivity: Intimacy, entrepreneurship and activism of East Asian migrants online and offline'', which is the fruit of an international conference entitled ‘'When physical and virtual spaces meet: the activism, care, and entrepreneurship of migrants, developed online and offline’', held at the Institute of Political Studies of Lyon (Sciences Po Lyon, France) in July 2021. The conference received funding from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, a major international funding source supporting East Asian Studies. This project also included illustrations created by UoP Illustration students to visualise the topic of each chapter.

The use of smartphones displays many facets of contemporary mobility. Smartphones and those applications downloaded to the device enhance connectivity in regard to socialisation, entertainment, transactions, networking, activism, and mobilisation. Whilst the device and applications help community building and boost a sense of belonging, they also generate alienation, exclusion and marginalisation. Such online mobility of capital, commodity, idea and emotion visualised on smartphones cannot take place without the parallel existence of technological, socio-political and economic infrastructure that is established in the physical world offline. In this light, this book argues that the use of smartphones, and the constant switch between online and offline, has meshed virtual, social and physical mobilities together. However, such inseparability is yet to break down the boundary that marks their distinctive and discrete existence. Put simply, the absence, loss, outage, switch-off, unaffordability, or confiscation of the device can easily obstruct this meshed mobility. Interrogating what causes these obstructions will highlight the indispensable role played by the material and social infrastructure in this meshed mobility as well as the embedded structural constraints. It is equally important to look at migration and mobility beyond the points of departure and destination and trace the process in between, as scholarship in migration studies has advocated. Thus, this book offers an insight into the compression and tension between online and offline and the interlaced modes of mobility.