https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920933649 International Journal of Cultural Studies 2020, Vol. 23(5) 621–638 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1367877920933649 journals.sagepub.com/home/ics Migrancy and digital mediations of emotion Donya Alinejad and Sandra Ponzanesi Utrecht University, The Netherlands Abstract This collection brings together key themes that integrate the scholarship on migration, digital media, and emotion. Drawing from a variety of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological traditions that cross-cut academic disciplines, the articles in this issue explore the emotional facets of digitally mediated migrant socialities in a variety of socio-cultural and geographic locales. These examinations raise important questions about how digital media ubiquity shapes global migration experiences and multicultural media publics at various scales. How are relations of intimacy and care at a distance articulated and experienced through social media? What does it mean to imagine home as a digitally mediated experience? In what unexpected ways are platforms reshaping migrant subjectivities? In this introductory article we address these and other questions, outlining how we believe the study of emotion can help us think more comprehensively about the digital mediation of migrants’ social lives in the current media age. Keywords affect, emotion, diaspora, digital media, migration, platforms, transnationalism The role of emotion in people’s mobile lives has long been marginal in migration studies. A prevalent focus on political and economic ‘push/pull’ factors has followed wider Corresponding author: Sandra Ponzanesi, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Muntstraat 2A, Utrecht, EV 3512, The Netherlands. Email: s.ponzanesi@uu.nl 933649ICS 0 0 10.1177/1367877920933649International Journal of Cultural StudiesAlinejad and Ponzanesi research-article 2020 Special Issue: Migration, Digital Media and Emotion