Digital Tactics of Refugee Women: Towards an Inclusive Framework for Digital Literacies

Abstract

This article examines the complex relationship between online and offline inequalities for shaping refugee women’s experiences during resettlement. Refugee women have unique challenges during resettlement, yet the role of gender in shaping refugees’ experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and associated risks is often overlooked. Research into the role of digital technologies in refugees’ resettlement is fragmented, spread across disciplines, and therefore lacks analytical focus. Motivated by a research field that is fragmented and lacks a gender analysis, we conducted a scoping review to (a) consolidate studies across disciplines on refugee women’s digital practices during resettlement and (b) propose tactics as an analytical approach to the study of the relationship between online and offline inequalities. Through the analytical framework of tactics, we review three thematic areas of the outcomes of digital technology use for refugees: social connectedness, access to information, and self‐presentation. We find that outcomes of refugee women’s ICT use are heavily shaped by gendered norms, expectations, and structural exclusion, and there is a strong need for a better understanding of the role of digital technologies in the lives of refugee women. This study has also demonstrated the use of tactics as an important analytical tool in pluralising understandings of digital literacies as a practice, and that tactics have a strong gendered component. Using tactics as an analytic tool illuminated that, while offline inequalities can inform outcomes of digital technology use, the same inequalities can shape the reappropriation of digital platforms to mitigate the risk of the practices, while gaining access to the outcomes. This study demonstrates that tactics offer a valuable conceptual framework to foreground refugee women’s situated agency in digitally mediated contexts.