Introduction

The text and sub­se­quent sequence of pho­tographs in this essay must be viewed togeth­er; they are nec­es­sar­i­ly com­ple­men­tary, and of equal impor­tance, in my mate­r­i­al approach to inves­ti­gat­ing ways that the net­worked infra­struc­ture of smart­phones expand the mean­ing of home and iden­ti­ty for refugees.¹

This cre­ative research project was devel­oped in 2019 with the aim of using visu­al ethnog­ra­phy to con­tex­tu­al­ize and bet­ter under­stand the expe­ri­ences, val­ues, needs, and aspi­ra­tions of Syr­i­an refugees set­tling in the Unit­ed King­dom. In response to an invi­ta­tion from the Her­bert Art Gallery and Muse­um in Coven­try to make por­traits of indi­vid­u­als who had recent­ly arrived from Syr­ia, I pro­posed to co-cre­ate and exhib­it art­works in response to the museum’s exist­ing col­lec­tion and dia­logue with local Syr­i­ans. I sought to sub­vert com­mon con­struc­tions of dif­fer­ence and imper­son­al depic­tions of “vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty” and “pow­er­less­ness” in exist­ing pho­tog­ra­phy depict­ing migra­tion (Chou­liara­ki & Stolić 2019), and instead offer a cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty with­out a dic­tat­ed course of action or out­come, the process of which might con­tribute to both the expe­ri­ence and under­stand­ing of resettlement.

Coven­try has the high­est rate of pop­u­la­tion growth of any U.K. city out­side of Lon­don, and migra­tion is the main dri­ver of this growth. Immi­gra­tion has always been a part of Coventry’s real­i­ty, and it has become a par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant fea­ture of the city’s eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion in recent years (Grif­fith & Mack­ela 2017). At the time of this project, Coven­try had wel­comed hun­dreds of refugees on The Syr­i­an Vul­ner­a­ble People’s Reset­tle­ment Scheme, a unique pro­gram designed by the local Cit­i­zens Advice Bureau, Coven­try Law Cen­tre, and the Coven­try Refugee and Migrant Cen­tre (CRMC), facil­i­tat­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with The Unit­ed Nations High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees. Refugees are greet­ed at the air­port by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the city coun­cil and CRMC. With­in four hours of their arrival, they are giv­en a pack­age with their name on; this con­tains a key to their new home, a library card, and a mobile phone SIM card charged with £20 cred­it. These items are care­ful­ly con­sid­ered for their poten­tial to make mean­ing­ful new con­nec­tions, pro­vide a sense of auton­o­my and mobil­i­ty, as well as grant­i­ng access (to one’s home, to the library, to region­al dig­i­tal infra­struc­tures). One man, who had a suc­cess­ful career as a lawyer in Syr­ia, took a job sup­port­ing new­ly arrived refugees and shap­ing the pro­gram of wel­come with the CMRC. He observed the “extreme hap­pi­ness” at the moment they put the U.K. SIM card in their smart­phones, “con­nec­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion is every­thing, the best gift.” These small mate­r­i­al arti­facts are the site in which net­worked con­nec­tiv­i­ty is enact­ed, set­ting off a chain of reac­tions that both aug­ment the social­i­ty and data mem­o­ry of users. One young man I talked to described the experience:

“Receiv­ing the pack­age was like an incred­i­ble feel­ing of wel­come and acknowl­edge­ment that some­one was think­ing of us… When I first arrived my SIM card from Jor­dan stopped work­ing and I felt total­ly out of touch with the world. When I got a U.K. SIM card I began to feel part of this coun­try… All my fam­i­ly and friends were wait­ing for news. The first thing I did was call them and send them pic­tures of my new bedroom.”

Smartphone suitcases

During infor­mal meet­ings at the CRMC, as well as the cen­tral City Library, I met and fos­tered rela­tion­ships with Syr­i­an refugees who had arrived to Coven­try with­in the pre­vi­ous two years. In groups and indi­vid­u­al­ly, we dis­cussed what mate­r­i­al items they val­ue in cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing a sense of home. Few men­tioned or could rec­ol­lect any belong­ings they retained on their jour­ney to the U.K. from Syr­ia, apart from their smart­phone. All indi­vid­u­als had either their own smart­phone or agreed access to one owned by fam­i­ly or friends. They not­ed their increased use of smart­phones since arriv­ing to the U.K. Such an obser­va­tion is con­sis­tent with Gille­spie et al.’s (2016, 2) char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the smart­phone as, “an essen­tial tool for refugees.” In one meet­ing Abdul summed up his feel­ings: “The phone is life, the phone is the suitcase.”

The SIM card gift­ed on arrival unlocks the “smart­phone suit­case,” con­nect­ing it to local car­ri­ers and thus enabling con­tact with scat­tered fam­i­ly and friends, per­son­al data mem­o­ries, as well as apps, which facil­i­tate func­tion­ing in a new place. The SIM can be viewed as a unique key to access region­al dig­i­tal infra­struc­tures, the­o­rized as “sig­nal ter­ri­to­ries” by media schol­ar Lisa Parks (2013). A sig­nal ter­ri­to­ry is anchored with­in, yet not iso­mor­phic with, state bounds; it con­nects with a dig­i­tal glob­al net­work, thus locat­ing, ori­en­tat­ing and tran­scend­ing geo­graph­i­cal bor­ders. A SIM card acti­vates a phone num­ber, which pro­vides a per­ma­nent loca­tion and secure con­tact base that works far bet­ter than a postal address today. Where­as ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of migrants turned to pho­to stu­dios, post­cards and postal ser­vices to record and send images back home, now a quick snap on the phone cam­era, post­ed onto What­sApp, imme­di­ate­ly com­mu­ni­cates every­day life. How­ev­er, this chan­nel of con­nec­tion has lim­i­ta­tions and is part of learn­ing a new way of life, as one man described:

“It took me and the oth­ers (refugees arriv­ing at the same time) around four months to work out where to go to top up our SIM cards with cred­it and how to com­mu­ni­cate what we need­ed. We were very care­ful with our cred­it. The peri­ods of con­nec­tion were like win­dows onto a new life in Coven­try between here, and fam­i­ly and friends not here.”

My con­ver­sa­tions iden­ti­fied how refugees sought to main­tain exist­ing rela­tion­ships and forge new ones, through what Blanke and Pybus (2020) call the fab­ric of the mobile phone ecosystem—the open infra­struc­tures of the web and the enclosed walled envi­ron­ments of plat­forms, apps, and per­son­al data. Most par­tic­i­pants empha­sized the vital role of Google Maps and Google Trans­late in nav­i­gat­ing their new lives in Coven­try. A few spoke of using the mes­sag­ing app Next Door Neigh­bour to build rela­tion­ships with their new local com­mu­ni­ty by run­ning errands for neigh­bours in need. Transna­tion­al emo­tion­al rela­tion­ships were once medi­at­ed through let­ter writ­ing and postal ser­vices (Thomas & Znaniec­ki 1996), more recent work notes the “vital role of the tele­phone” among asy­lum seek­ers (Leung et al. 2009, 7), and Uimo­nen (2013) dis­cuss­es the role of place bound inter­net cafes for main­tain­ing strong ties and keep­ing up to date with world news. Those I encoun­tered in Coven­try explained that they relied on the city library for pub­lic inter­net access when they lacked cred­it to con­nect their SIM card or want­ed to stream Syr­i­an films and car­toons, which a num­ber of par­tic­i­pants not­ed “trans­port­ed” them to a feel­ing of “home.” How­ev­er, this point of con­nec­tion can­not com­pare to the crit­i­cal sense of auton­o­my and phys­i­cal inti­ma­cy afford­ed by the per­son­al smart­phone. One woman par­tic­i­pant elaborated:

“It [the smart­phone] is a part of myself and part of my personality—it is like a vital body part—it helps me men­tal­ly to feel alive […] I can say that it gives me a much big­ger feel­ing of free­dom than a car or bike…”

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of acces­si­ble per­son­al dig­i­tal devices in recent years chal­lenges us to con­sid­er the data com­mu­ni­cat­ed through and archived with­in mobile devices as tac­tile rep­re­sen­ta­tions of shared emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences, akin to phys­i­cal let­ters or pho­to­graph­ic prints. In link­ing Syr­i­an net­works of belong­ing to region­al dig­i­tal infra­struc­tures, the net­worked infra­struc­ture afford­ed by the SIM card on mobile devices can extend the feel­ing of pres­ence in a new place. This draws on the work of David Con­rad­son and Deirdre Mck­ay (2007), who insist that migrant sub­jects are mul­ti­ply locat­ed, with strong sens­es of attach­ment and respon­si­bil­i­ty to fam­i­ly, friends, and place. They assert the impor­tance of emo­tions and feel­ings in under­stand­ing both mobil­i­ty and place­ment in social life. In Mckay’s study of a Fil­ipino fam­i­ly, locat­ed in Hong Kong and the Philip­pines, she describes this as a “translo­cal field of inti­ma­cy [that] elab­o­rates on pre­vi­ous co-present rela­tions” (2007, 191). The imme­di­a­cy of dig­i­tal con­nec­tion can enable an intense embod­ied pres­enc­ing of oth­ers as near-per­pet­u­al com­pan­ions in life (Frosh 2018). For the refugees I met in Coven­try, the net­worked con­nec­tion afford­ed by the SIM card rep­re­sents con­tra­dic­to­ry feel­ings of both empow­er­ment and fragili­ty, prox­im­i­ty, and dis­tance. It nour­ish­es a sense of inti­ma­cy with scat­tered loved ones, as well as facil­i­tat­ing new expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge that draws them apart. As one woman shared:

“In the first few weeks I took pho­tographs of every­thing with my phone and shared them online until the cred­it ran out. It was all so new and excit­ing to try to under­stand and explain to my fam­i­ly and friends. But now I delib­er­ate­ly don’t share because it hurts. It hurts me because I want them to be here, and it hurts them because they want to be here.”

Methods in Making

The project engaged approx­i­mate­ly 30 peo­ple includ­ing a core group of ten who cre­at­ed the art­works, five women and five men between the ages of 15 and 60. The con­cept of the SIM card art­work devel­oped in response to infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions with par­tic­i­pants about the objects they most val­ue in cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing a sense of home, as well as explo­rations of the Coven­try City archives. As dis­cussed above, the SIM card gift­ed on arrival to the city is seen to sym­bol­ize inde­pen­dence in a new place and under­stand­ing of self in rela­tion to past, present, and future. A par­tic­i­pant artic­u­lat­ed, “The sim card is like the petrol in the car, the phone is the car. I would feel impris­oned with­out it.”

The reflec­tive and rela­tion­al nature of art mak­ing informed and enriched our exchanges, under­stand­ing of each oth­er, and out­comes. In most meet­ings an inter­preter assist­ed when trans­la­tion was required, but our non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, medi­at­ed by mobile phones and draw­ings, proved the most engaged and insight­ful. In per­son and through What­sApp mes­sages, par­tic­i­pants shared pic­tures of them­selves, their friends, and loca­tions in Syr­ia, as well as pho­tographs they had tak­en in the process of dis­cov­er­ing and map­ping Coven­try. Pho­tographs as repos­i­to­ries of his­to­ry and mem­o­ry acquired new dimen­sions when incor­po­rat­ed into descrip­tions of their new life in the city. The weath­er and ter­rain in Syr­ia and the U.K. were com­pared through pho­tographs of sun-bleached, semi-rur­al land­scapes, and those of Coventry’s famed post-war archi­tec­ture set under rather grey­er skies. Par­tic­i­pants were also invit­ed to share feel­ings and sto­ries by draw­ing. This respon­sive process of mak­ing became vital to my per­cep­tion of their cur­rent val­ues, con­nec­tions, and struggles.

The anthro­pol­o­gists of mate­r­i­al cul­ture Tim Ingold and Eliz­a­beth Hal­lam empha­size the role of learn­ing by doing, ethno­graph­ic analy­sis of the embod­ied cre­ativ­i­ty and impro­vi­sa­tion inher­ent in mak­ing is a mutu­al learn­ing process (Ingold 2013). The par­tic­i­pants’ draw­ings illus­trat­ed ambi­tions for their lives in the U.K., they revealed fam­i­ly net­works and pro­fes­sion­al skills. Our dia­logue cir­cled around their eager desires to tan­gi­bly con­tribute to the city of Coven­try. These desires includ­ed, among many oth­er things, set­ting up the city’s first Syr­i­an restau­rant and cook­ery school, as well as offer­ing their skills in the arts of cal­lig­ra­phy, music, and hairdressing.

A few Syr­i­an women were keen to have por­traits tak­en in their “Coven­try clothes.” Muna explained that she felt lib­er­at­ed from the more for­mal expec­ta­tions of women’s dress in Syr­ia and want­ed to pro­mote this free­dom with­in the Syr­i­an com­mu­ni­ty online. She dreamt of estab­lish­ing a clothes design busi­ness for Mus­lim women in the U.K. fus­ing Mid­dle East­ern and British styles. One man proud­ly asked me to pho­to­graph his daugh­ter in her Taek­won­do out­fit, a sport she had tak­en up on arriv­ing to Coven­try, so that he could share it on What­sApp. He explained how the net­worked smart­phone is essen­tial for his fam­i­ly to main­tain and devel­op their “two selves”: “It is a way for my chil­dren to remem­ber the faces, the places, the lan­guage of Syr­ia, and for our fam­i­ly to build a secure future life here.”

I orga­nized a group tour of the Herbert’s archives for the par­tic­i­pants to con­sid­er how arti­facts nar­rate the sto­ries of peo­ple who have shaped the city’s sto­ry. We were par­tic­u­lar­ly drawn to the sto­ries ema­nat­ing from the exten­sive col­lec­tion of keys dat­ing from the 12^th-19^th cen­tu­ry. In medieval Coven­try esteemed res­i­dents and vis­i­tors were pre­sent­ed with a “Key to the City,” as a sym­bol­ic ges­ture of wel­come, empow­er­ment, and con­nec­tion. We decid­ed to base our archival art­works on the design of the SIM card, the con­tem­po­rary wel­come gift, which acts as a key to unlock­ing a net­worked sense of iden­ti­ty and fos­ter­ing feel­ings of “home,” emo­tions that are essen­tial to imag­ined futures, as Yuval-Davis (2011, 9) describes in her inves­tiga­tive book on the pol­i­tics of belong­ing. This pre­cious SIM card also sig­ni­fies the com­plex­i­ty of reset­tle­ment and con­flict­ing feel­ings of attach­ment to their new lives in Coven­try, and ties to loved ones who do not share the same spatiotemporality.

I com­mis­sioned a sil­ver­smith to make repli­ca SIMs in sol­id sil­ver. The par­tic­i­pants’ designs based on their draw­ings were engraved onto the SIMs, as pre­sent­ed in the pho­tographs below. To mir­ror the codes on the back of stan­dard SIM cards, par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted mean­ing­ful numer­i­cal con­fig­u­ra­tions, such as dates of arrival in Coven­try, deaths of loved ones in Syr­ia, and birth dates. The use of sil­ver was sym­bol­ic; refined sil­ver smithing is a craft with which the city of Coven­try has long asso­ci­a­tions, and sil­ver is also the most con­duc­tive metal—a emblem of con­nec­tion. The sculp­tures were gold plat­ed to repli­cate the lay­er of gold on actu­al SIM cards and to empha­size their trea­sured emo­tion­al and prac­ti­cal val­ue today. In the exhi­bi­tion the SIMs, engraved with the expe­ri­ences, needs, and aspi­ra­tions of recent­ly arrived Syr­i­an refugees, were pre­sent­ed along­side select­ed keys from the museum’s col­lec­tion dat­ing from the 12^th through to the 19^th cen­turies. The new arti­facts were also acquired by the Her­bert collection.

Par­tic­i­pants request­ed that the SIM arti­facts be fash­ioned into pen­dants to wear around the neck, and that I make pro­fes­sion­al por­traits of them. The SIM pen­dants that sit close to the skin draw atten­tion to how mean­ing and mat­ter entan­gle. Ideas aris­ing in dia­logue likened the smart­phone to a limb, and the use of it akin to blink­ing or breath­ing. Deb­o­rah Lup­ton argues that mate­ri­al­iza­tions and exten­sions, alter­na­tive ways of know­ing and enact­ing bod­ies and selves, are cen­tral to self­hood. Lup­ton (2016) sees our per­son­al dig­i­tal data as reli­quar­ies of our human­i­ty, tes­ta­ment to our lived expe­ri­ences and unique iden­ti­ty. In this case, the SIM pen­dants, engraved with per­son­al num­bers and visu­al mes­sages, mate­ri­al­ize the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of this mat­ter in an inti­mate­ly worn item and high­light the ways that our dig­i­tal data and devices are vul­ner­a­ble to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and control.

Concluding reflections

This inves­ti­ga­tion touched on the sym­bol­ic, emo­tion­al, and prac­ti­cal val­ue of the SIM card as the over­looked back­bone of mod­ern mobile communication—a key to unlock­ing transna­tion­al as well as local net­works, fab­ri­cat­ing per­son­al data and imag­ined futures. This pre­lim­i­nary cre­ative research revealed a respon­si­bil­i­ty to bet­ter attend to the unfold­ing and gen­er­a­tive ways that humans and smart­phone infra­struc­tures inter­mesh in aca­d­e­m­ic research, reset­tle­ment pro­grammes and muse­um collections.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion built on pre­vi­ous stud­ies with refugee migrant groups that cite the fun­da­men­tal role dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy can play in build­ing social cap­i­tal, and hence social inclu­sion (Alam & Imran 2015). Our crit­i­cal “open­ing-up” of the smart­phone will con­tribute to ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tions that seek ways to mate­ri­al­ly express the mul­ti­di­men­sion­al agency and sense of belong­ing afford­ed by the SIM card. This minute over­looked arti­fact enables indi­vid­u­als to make con­nec­tions across place and time, facil­i­tat­ing a sense of iden­ti­ty and belong­ing. The research par­tic­i­pants and I view the SIM card as a pre­cious and evolv­ing sto­ry­board of inti­mate relationships.

Fol­low­ing the ampli­fied reliance on net­worked mobile devices dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the poten­tial for severe iso­la­tion has been thrown into the spot­light, as well as ques­tions over the track­ing of pri­vate data by gov­ern­ments and tech com­pa­nies. Recent lit­er­a­ture on the ethics of data use ques­tions whether and how it is pos­si­ble to bal­ance the right to pri­va­cy with the right to be pro­tect­ed from harm, and the right to be left alone with the right to be seen (Tay­lor 2016). From the moment of con­nec­tion via the inti­mate mobile device, refugees are thrust forth from pow­er­less­ness to pos­si­bil­i­ty and depen­dence. A num­ber of U.K.-based migra­tion char­i­ties (Bris­tol Refugee Rights, CMRC) and schol­ars (Fels­berg­er & Sub­ra­man­ian 2021) are cur­rent­ly cam­paign­ing for mobile inter­net access to be addressed in rela­tion to oth­er human rights. This emerg­ing dis­course over the right to mobile inter­net access, also rec­og­nized by the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (2017), demon­strates a shift in glob­al under­stand­ing of what makes us human and the con­tem­po­rary mean­ing of home and belonging.

In response to Leurs’s & Smets’s (2018, 1) thought­ful call for “a reflex­ive pol­i­tics of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion,” I will close by ask­ing, how might we bet­ter include the net­worked mate­ri­al­i­ty of dig­i­tal data and smart­phones in nar­rat­ing and archiv­ing con­tem­po­rary sto­ries of migration?

Acknowledgments

The project was com­mis­sioned by Grain Projects in part­ner­ship with the Her­bert Muse­um & Art Gallery, sup­port­ed by Arts Coun­cil Eng­land, Coven­try Uni­ver­si­ty, and Coven­try City Council.

Thanks to Abdul, Peter Bar­nett, Jon­ny Bark, Jack Matts, John Aspell Jew­ellers, Rosie Adden­brooke, Mar­tin Roberts, Paul Gard­ner, and the par­tic­i­pants who gen­er­ous­ly shared their sto­ries and creativity.