Immobility During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Mobile Perspective of Detained Refugees on Twitter

Throughout the covid-19 pandemic, social media played a prominent role in conveying information about policies regarding the management of unforeseen limitations of freedom of movement (Nguyet Erni/Striphas 2023; Wodak 2022). Yet while communities and individuals resorted to social media to find and share information, they also searched for a digital third place, i.e. a social environment that was neither home nor work and could provide a space for their communicative needs (Oldenburg 1989; Hadi/ Evawani 2019). Building on an ongoing research project (Russo 2020; 2023; Grasso/Russo 2022), the article investigates a purposely built corpus comprising tweets posted by a group of digitally active refugees detained in the Australian context during the covid-19 pandemic (March-October 2020). The paper critically examines the multimodal discursive expressions and strategies that permeated the digital environment under investigation. More specifically, it focuses on the discursive construction of digital mobility and/ versus permanent/temporary physical immobility in the context of the global health crisis. The analysis employs a combined Corpus-based Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to social media discourse (KhosraviNik 2014; 2017; Unger et al. 2016; Zappavigna 2012) to reach an understanding of how refugees narrated their own physical segregation with x/Twitter being the only possibility to experience mobility.