Mediatized Transient Migrants

This book explores the role of new media technology in transient migration in terms of mobility, national identity, and sense of home. Through 40 personal interviews with Korean migrants, Claire Shinhea Lee analyzes how homeland media in the transnational space helps migrants make, connect to, and complicate home.

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Mediatized Transient Migrants: Korean Visa-Status Migrants’ Transnational Everyday Lives and Media Use examines the role of digital media in Korean visa-status migrants’ everyday lives in terms of their senses of home, belonging, and identity. Based on personal interviews with 40 migrants living in Austin, Texas, Claire Shinhea Lee argues that the mundane use of homeland media brought by new media technology allows these migrants to make, connect to, and complicate home in their transnational space

Through the theoretical framework of mediatization and transnationalism, Lee shows similarities and differences among different U.S. visa categories—workers in specialty occupations (H1B, L1, OPT), academic students (F1), and their dependents (F2, L2, H4)—and analyzes not only multi-positionality within the transient migration but also the gendered structure of the visa system.