Mihaela Nedelcu is Titular Professor of Sociology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Since her pioneering book Le migrant online (2009), she has developed her expertise in digital migration studies, focusing on transnational families, e-diasporas and e-borders.Ibrahim Soysüren is a senior researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He has conducted comparative research on the deportation of foreigners and the use of biometric databases and has published extensively on these topics as well as on migration processes.

• Introduction – Precarious migrants, migration regimes and digital technologies: the empowerment-control nexus 1. Empowering experiences of digitally mediated flows of information for connected migrants on the move 2. Navigating the Aegean Sea: smartphones, transnational activism and viapolitical in(ter)ventions in contested maritime borderzones 3. Bare life in an immigration jail: technologies of surveillance in U.S. pre-deportation detention 4. Deportation, smart borders and mobile citizens: using digital methods and traditional police activities to deport EU citizens 5. Bordering processes through the use of technology: the Turkish case 6. European instruments for the deportation of foreigners and their uses by France and Switzerland: the application of the Dublin III Regulation and Eurodac 7. The Schengen-wide entry ban: how are non-citizens’ personal data protected?

This collection, edited by Mihaela Nedelcu and Ibrahim Soysüren, promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the contradictory mediating roles digital technologies play in the lives of migrants. The focus is on mobile subjects who are made precarious as a result of migration regimes, such as forced, vulnerable, undocumented and deported migrants. The articles demonstrate how the “digital empowerment-control nexus” is variously experienced on the ground, contributing to the interdisciplinary research area of digital migration studies by offering conceptual, methodological and empirical means to overcome binary either-or approaches. - Dr Koen Leurs, Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.