Signaling Taste From Abroad: Case of High-Skilled Turkish Women Migrants' Everyday Visibility

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2. Visibility, disability, & Telegram

Abstract

Digital migration research has largely analyzed social media as a tool through which migrants sustain transnational ties and maintain connections with those left behind. Yet this focus on connectivity obscures how platforms also operate as arenas where migrants negotiate recognition, status, and belonging in a hostland after migration. This paper examines public Instagram accounts of high-skilled Turkish women migrants to Europe to argue that platformed visibility functions as a mechanism of status reconstruction following mobility. Drawing on platform affordance theory and Bourdieusian concepts of illusio and distinction, I conceptualize migrants’ everyday posts as forms of taste signaling through which professional and cultural capital are re-legitimized. Rather than merely expressing identity, Instagram becomes a field where belonging is actively performed, recognized, and contested.

Author

• Irmak Evren, Ankara Medipol University