Sophia Symposium "Migration in the Age of AI: Work, Education and Belonging" (Hybrid)

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October 3-4, 2026

Room 1702, Building 2, Sophia University

Organizers: Megha Wadhwa, David H. Slater (Sophia University) and Michiel Baas (Leiden University)

Digital technologies have long shaped how migrants sustain family ties, navigate borders, and build belonging. Artificial intelligence now pushes this further—promising to smooth language barriers and settlement, yet raising the question of whether such tools genuinely help or foster dependence that erodes the drive to learn, while also reshaping who is selected, ranked, surveilled, or turned away.

This two-day symposium at Sophia University brings together scholars and practitioners to examine what AI is doing to contemporary mobility. Across keynotes, three panels, and a book talk, participants trace algorithmic borders and datafied governance, the contested role of translation tools in language learning and integration, and the social-media imaginaries that shape migration aspirations. A closing roundtable asks where these digital futures lead. Together, the contributions probe the promises, tensions, and consequences of migration in an age increasingly mediated by machines.

Register Here: https://forms.gle/NZu9XzqdYP5emfB2A

DAY ONE (October 3) 10:30 to 12:00

Opening keynotes: AI, borders, and the future of migration

10/3 Keynote (1)

The Present Future of Migration: Artificial Intelligence and the question of (Cross Border) Mobility

Michiel Baas, Leiden University

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming migration regimes in ways that demand renewed theoretical attention. Drawing on the manifesto The End of Migration and recent anthropological work on AI and everyday life in India, this paper argues that migration is increasingly detached from settlement, permanence, and citizenship. Instead, mobility is reorganized through systems of surveillance, prediction, classification, and extraction that render migrants governable as temporary and disposable labour.

The paper argues that AI is not simply an additional tool within migration management but part of a broader infrastructural transformation reshaping how mobility itself is imagined and governed. Predictive analytics, biometric identification, algorithmic risk profiling, and digital monitoring increasingly produce what might be called algorithmic mobility regimes. These systems blur distinctions between migrant, refugee, student, temporary worker, and asylum seeker, evaluating individuals through shifting calculations of desirability, productivity, and risk. At the same time, the paper moves beyond state-centered perspectives by examining how migrants themselves engage AI technologies in everyday life—for language learning, bureaucratic navigation, emotional support, and strategic mobility practices.

Building on ethnographic reflections from India, the paper proposes that the “coming future” of AI is already here. Algorithmic systems increasingly shape access to movement, work, education, and belonging, while embedding new forms of opacity and exclusion within digital infrastructures. Rather than treating AI as external to social life, the paper suggests that humans increasingly “live with” and navigate algorithmic systems that simultaneously expand and constrain the conditions under which mobility and future-making become imaginable.

Michiel Baas is an anthropologist whose research focuses on artificial intelligence, migration, mobility, and global inequality. Drawing on long-term ethnographic work in India, particularly among data scientists, artists, and creative professionals in Bangalore, his work explores AI not simply as a technological tool, but as a broader social and political infrastructure that reorganizes how people move, work, communicate, and imagine the future. Baas has been affiliated with institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the University of Amsterdam, the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS, Leiden University)

10/3 Keynote (2)

Transgressive Surveillance: Digital Borders and Resistance Between Datafication and Forced Disappearance

Romm Lewkowicz, Max Planck Institute

In April 2021, a Palestinian woman and her three children hid in the woods on the Greek island of Samos for five days, trying to reach the EU camp to be fingerprinted before undercover agents could push them back across the Aegean without a trace. Samos is one of the EU's migrant hotspots, where those trying to reach Europe are biometrically processed, datafied, and monitored by AI-driven systems, yet pushbacks like the one she evaded have become what international bodies call the "de facto general policy," in the Mediterranean even as the state officially denies they occur.

The talk takes this case as its starting point for analysing a current conjuncture of border regimes. On one side stands an unprecedented apparatus of digitized surveillance, which has drawn the bulk of scholarly attention, framed through expectations of control via datafied capture and of resistance as evading the state's gaze. But this model is unsettled by covert pushbacks, which run on analog naked power, the erasure of evidence, the destruction of identity documents, and on preventing access to biometric registration.

Rather than casting them as the rogue shadow of official surveillance, the talk thinks the two together through the concept of transgressive surveillance: a mode of governance whereby the state rules through escalating transgressions of its own system, which it nonetheless maintains, because that system is what lends the transgression its violence of deniability. Transgressive surveillance names both this emerging mode of governance and how migrants and civil-society actors transgress digital technologies in turn, to secure movement and document state crime.

Romm Lewkowicz (PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. His forthcoming book, Documenting the Undocumented: Biometrics, Migration, and the Remaking of Europe, currently at editorial review with Stanford University Press, is a multi-sited ethnography of lived biometric surveillance. His current projects include "How to Control a Border Without Acknowledging That It Exists," a study of border ontologies set at Europe's repressed "illegal" border in Cyprus, and "States of Transgression," on performative excess in undercover migrant pushback operations. Lewkowicz's work has appeared in Visual Anthropology Review, Migration Letters, and International Migration. His research has been supported by the Max Planck Society, the Social Science Research Council, the European Research Council, the PublicsLab at CUNY, the Mondriaan Fonds, the Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective.

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break

DAY ONE (October 3) 13:00 to 15:00

PANEL 1: Algorithmic borders and datafied migration governance

10/3 Panel 1 (1)

When Borders Become Algorithms: An Anthropological Perspective on Datafied Welfare and Situated Agency among Unaccompanied Minors

Elisabetta Di Giovanni, Gloria Zuccaro, Massimiliano Schirinzi,

University of Palermo

This paper interrogates the reconfiguration of migration governance under conditions of algorithmic mediation, examining how artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures reshape mobility regimes, produce differentiated subjectivities, and reconfigure forms of belonging within the Italian System of Reception and Integration (SAI) for unaccompanied foreign minors in Palermo, Southern Italy. The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the reception project Casa dei Mirti, articulating embedded professional practice and anthropological inquiry as co-constitutive epistemic positions.

Engaging critical debates on algorithmic governmentality, digital bordering, and datafied sovereignty (Amoore 2020; Bigo 2014; De Genova 2017; Mezzadra & Neilson 2013), borders are conceptualised as dispersed dispositifs operationalised through algorithmic infrastructures that sort, classify, and differentially include migrants within stratified regimes of protection. Automated residence-permit platforms, algorithmically structured welfare interfaces, digital educational systems, and AI-driven translation tools constitute an assemblage of everyday bordering technologies. These enact forms of infrastructural power (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), generating opacity, dependency, and asymmetric digital literacies.

Yet the ethnographic material complicates exclusively biopolitical readings. A deaf minor’s use of AI-assisted transcription systems and visually mediated platforms to sustain transnational relationality foregrounds how algorithmic mediation may reconfigure — rather than constrain — embodied difference. Drawing on disability studies (Garland-Thomson 2009; Goodley 2014), vulnerability is reconceptualised as situated capacity within algorithmically structured welfare assemblages.

Integration, we argue, is constituted within these datafied governance regimes as a contested achievement at the intersection of algorithmic rationality, relational care, and the embodied agency of young people who navigate — and at times subvert — the digital infrastructures governing their lives.

E. Di Giovanni is Associate Professor of Anthropology (University of Palermo). Gloria Zuccaro is pedagosist-social worker and Coordinator of Unaccompanied Minors Reception Center. M. Schirinzi is English and Italian Teacher as Second Language (L2)

10/3 Panel 1 (2)

Making the Digital Homeland: Everyday Data and Citizenship Narratives

Suruchi Mazumdar, University of Nottingham Malaysia

This paper explores how marginalised, exiled refugee groups in the global South such as the Rohingya, an ethnic minority Muslim community from Myanmar, negotiate with platforms and AI- and data-centric technologies to articulate claims of citizenship and nationalism in Bangladesh and Malayasia, Muslim-majority host countries in South and Southeast Asia.

Traditionally, digital platforms such as Facebook were linked to personal freedoms through global networks. The scholarship of diasporic uses of technology addresses issues related to digital capabilities, infrastructures, and platforms, as well as the agency/ resistance strategies by diasporic groups. Such celebratory approach has been sobered by the widespread use of technological assemblage for governance. Biometric, AI, and blockchain, which are used by humanitarian agencies, local governments, and corporate actors, foreground the classic security-versus-human rights dilemma. But this scholarship ignores the question of affective possibilities. This paper thus captures the tension between the emancipatory promises and restrictive limits of technology, and recentres marginalised exiled, refugee groups’ affective digital creative practices and everyday use and negotiations with mobile communication.

This paper draws from qualitative interviews with refugee digital content creators and civil society actors, digital ethnographic methods, critical thematic and discourse analysis of interviews and user- generated digital content. The paper introduces the conceptual category of digital homeland. It argues that affective creative practices, as constituted by digital family making and archiving/ documentation, must be recentred in data justice and humanitarianism, beyond the top-down, data-centric approaches of emergency support and refugee management

Suruchi Mazumdar (PhD Nanyang Technological University Singapore) is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at University of Nottingham Malaysia as an Associate Professor, in 2026. Prior to this, Suruchi taught in India at O.P. Jindal Global University. She was a visiting scholar in Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies at University of Pennsylvania. She has teaching and research interests in media-politics and social movements, digital and data activisms, and the interface of technology, ethics, and migration. Her research was supported by the doctoral fellowship and fee-waiver award at Nanyang Technological University and UNESCO. Her research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals, namely Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Global Media and China, Transnational Legal Theory, and Television & New Media, and edited volumes. Suruchi is the author of the book “Divided Media Politics and Mediated Movements in India” (Routledge, 2025).

10/3 Panel 1 (3)

“Anyone got into trouble for this?”: Partner Migration and Proof of Relationship Genuineness in the Age of AI

Alexandra Ridgway, RMIT University

Australia’s partner visa system has a reputation for being complex, time-consuming, and opaque. Applicants seeking to migrate to Australia as intimate partners of an Australian citizen or permanent resident are required by immigration to provide extensive evidence that their relationship is “genuine”. This can include communications between partners, photographs, and evidence of shared bank accounts, with these “technologies of love” (D’Aoust, 2013) used to translate intimacy into auditable records for the state (Geoffrion, 2021; Borges Jelinic & Ridgway, 2024).

With generative AI tools becoming increasingly accessible, the possibility of using AI to produce “proof of a genuine relationship” has emerged as a topic of debate within partner migration circles. Drawing on video content created by migration agents involved in the Australian partner migration system, and analysis of the Australian partner-visa megathread on Reddit and a dialogic examination of ChatGPT’s responses to partner visa queries, this paper explores competing views of the issue. In some cases, AI assistance is framed as deceptive and an act which compromises integrity. Alternative views see it as a pragmatic response to formulaic evidentiary demands, while also meeting the system on its own terms given the increasing use of AI within immigration processes (Colley, 2025).

Against the backdrop of the emerging Age of AI, the paper brings a new perspective to existing discussions in migration studies about the assessment of migrant ‘authenticity’, the state’s capacity to police intimate life (and how this is resisted), and how border governance can compel particular narratives of love, legitimacy, and deservingness.

Alexandra Ridgway is a Lecturer in Criminology and Justice Studies at RMIT University, a Fellow with the Centre for Criminology at The University of Hong Kong and a Member of the Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (RMIT University). A sociologist of family, personal, and intimate life, she studies family breakdown, divorce, family and sexual violence, and bereavement, primarily within the context of migration. Her research explores how law and regulation shape these experiences, and more recently, how technology - including AI - affects regulatory systems, human practices, and personal relationships. Her current research examines the use of AI for navigating Australia's partner migration system.

10/3 Panel 1 (4)

Taiwan as an AI Island? Labour control regimes, sovereignty, and the geopolitics of the ‘Future of Work’

Yannis-Adam Allouache, National University Singapore

Debates on artificial intelligence often centre on hopes and anxieties surrounding human-like intelligence, economic growth, job displacement, and environmental impact. AI discourses speak of an ‘ideal worker’ almost exclusively defined as a highly skilled and flexible knowledge worker. Yet the labour sustaining AI’s advancement is largely performed by subaltern workers who remain invisible within the industry’s dominant narratives of progress.

Taiwan, the world’s leading producer of semiconductors, relies heavily on low-waged migrant workers from Southeast Asia who labour around the clock to meet the rising demand for high-end chips. Positioned in the global chip war as home to leading semiconductor companies that manufacture the lion’s share of advanced chips for sprawling AI data centres and other electronics, Taiwan is facing labour shortages in its factories and is recruiting workers from Southeast Asian nations to meet the surge in demand for AI chips. For instance, reports indicate that many chip manufacturers now have production lines almost entirely staffed by Filipino workers, with further recruitment underway.

Drawing on long-term research into migrant labour struggles in Taiwan, alongside recent empirical data on the labour regimes emerging from Taiwan’s AI-fuelled chip boom, this paper brings labour-centred, urban political ecological, and postcolonial frameworks into conversation to generate new insights into the migrant labour geographies of AI production. It presents ongoing research on the subaltern workers powering AI advancements and explores the interconnected dynamics of labour exploitation, environmental degradation, and resource extraction in the global chip war.

Yannis-Adam Allouache is Max Weber Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Asian Urbanisms Cluster, as part of the DIJ-ARI Asian Infrastructures Research Partnership, and the Max Weber Foundation research node on “Global Indo-Pacific: Connecting Histories and Futures” at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). Dr Yannis-Adam’s research explores the politics of transregional migration, labour precarity, and its intersections with urban environmental transformations. He received his PhD in Geography from NUS in 2024, with a dissertation titled “Infrastructural Geographies of Precarious Labour and Solidarity: Southeast Asian Migrants’ Employment Journeys across Taiwan’s Urban Peripheries.” His work can be read in journals such as the RGS-IBG’s Area, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.

15:00-15:20 Coffee Break

DAY ONE (October 3) 15:20 to 17:00

PANEL 2: AI, work, communication, and the making of migrant belonging

10/3 Panel 2 (1)

AI Translation and the Politics of Belonging: Does Technology Replace Language Learning?

Muhammad Ala Uddin, University of Chittagong

This paper explores how AI-based translation applications shape migrant integration and the politics of belonging. It asks a central question: does reliance on AI translation foster inclusion, or does it unintentionally weaken incentives for language learning and deeper social integration?

Grounded in anthropological theories of language, identity, and everyday belonging, and informed by scholarship on digital mediation and technological dependency, the paper conceptualizes AI translation as both a tool of empowerment and a potential site of subtle exclusion. Methodologically, the study is based on qualitative fieldwork in Bangladesh with prospective migrants and returnee workers preparing for employment in Japan and the Gulf. It draws on 30 semi-structured interviews and participant observations in language training centers in Dhaka and Chattogram. A small survey of 80 migrant workers and students complements the qualitative data, focusing on patterns of AI translation use, attitudes toward language acquisition, and perceptions of integration abroad. The findings suggest that AI translation enhances functional inclusion by enabling migrants to navigate workplaces, public services, and everyday transactions with greater confidence. However, heavy dependence on translation apps may reduce motivation for sustained language learning and limit informal social interaction with host communities. Rather than replacing language acquisition entirely, AI tools contribute to hybrid communicative practices, where partial language skills are supplemented by digital mediation.

The paper contributes to debates on migration in the age of AI by highlighting how technological assistance reshapes not only communication but also identity formation, social distance, and long-term belonging. It calls for migration and training policies that integrate digital literacy with meaningful language education.

Ala Uddin is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. In addition to a focus on the indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Uddin researches the Rohingya refugee crisis, migration and diaspora issues, urban landscapes, health and culture, religious pluralism, and environment & climate change. He has published several articles on Rohingya issues, indigenous people, urban poor, and religion & rituals in peer-reviewed journals of repute, such as Ethnopolitics, Journal of Refugee Studies, Development in Practice, and Asian Ethnicity.

10/3 Panel 2 (2)

Algorithmic Acculturation in Social Care: How Migrant Workers Learn “Professional Care” Through Conversational AI

Neerej Dev, University of Wolverhampton

Conversational AI is increasingly embedded in everyday communication and documentation within social care, shaping how shift handovers, incident reports, family updates, and reflective logs are written and evaluated. These genres are not neutral; they are tightly coupled to auditability, accountability, and moral judgements about what constitutes “good care” and a “good worker.” For migrant care workers, this landscape is intensified by language insecurity, accent discrimination, and unequal exposure to organisational risk.

This paper examines how migrant social care workers in the UK, learn to navigate these pressures through what I term algorithmic acculturation. The study asks, how do migrant workers learn and perform professional “respectability” when using conversational AI for workplace writing, how do they infer what AI systems and organisations expect, and how do these micro-practices scale into shared documentation cultures that reshape care itself? Theoretically, the paper reframes conversational AI not as a neutral helper but as a normative institution embedded in labour regimes. Drawing on existing scholarship, the paper introduces algorithmic respectability as a pragmatic survival strategy in which tone, affect, and narrative structure are calibrated to anticipated AI-mediated and managerial scrutiny.

Empirically, the paper uses a multi-method qualitative design with 30 migrant care workers, alongside non-migrant comparison interviews and interviews with supervisors and administrators. Data collection integrates semi-structured interviews, a short longitudinal micro-panel to capture learning over time, a prompt-ethnography module reconstructing real workplace writing tasks step-by-step, and a vignette exercise producing AI-assisted and unaided drafts. Analysis combines thematic coding with close text analysis to identify recurrent transformations. Findings show that workers actively learn to “read” AI expectations and organisational risk regimes, adjusting their writing to remain legible and defensible. While AI can reduce linguistic anxiety, it also standardises professionalism, often stripping emotion and redistributing reputational risk onto already precarious workers. Repeated use allows AI-generated templates and tones to circulate informally, becoming common sense norms, what this paper conceptualises as algorithmic cultural production.

The paper contributes a comparative account of how conversational AI reshapes care work. It offers implications for AI governance and design that support multilingual workers without enforcing narrow, culturally specific standards of professionalism or intensifying audit-driven harms.

Neerej Dev is a doctoral researcher at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He studies how technology, mobility, and media infrastructures shape gendered identities and social stratification. His doctoral research analyses how post-Brexit policy shape gendered work, belonging and mobility among Indian care workers in the UK.  In 2025, he received research funding from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), to undertake collaborative research on circular migration of medical students in Europe.

10/3 Panel 2 (3)

Between Machine Translation and Cultural Memory: Migrant Language Learning in Contemporary Japan

Aadya Sabu Ambika, University of Kerala

On the first day of my Japanese language class, a student preparing to migrate to Tokyo confidently translated an entire visa form using Google Translate in seconds. Yet the same student hesitated when asked how to introduce herself politely in Japanese, unsure when to bow, which honorific to choose, or how to address a future employer appropriately. This small classroom moment reveals a growing paradox in migrant preparation: while AI-driven translation tools enable immediate communicative access, they may simultaneously weaken deeper cultural-linguistic integration.

This paper examines how machine translation systems such as Google Translate and generative AI like Gemini and ChatGPT increasingly mediate the language-learning practices of students planning to study, work, and settle in Japan. Drawing on my dual position as a research scholar of Japanese cultural memory and experience from Japanese-language teaching to migrant-bound learners, I analyse how overreliance on automated translation encourages what we can term as transactional belonging; a form of functional comprehension sufficient for navigating bureaucracy and daily tasks, but insufficient for meaningful participation in social and cultural life.

Through classroom analysis of student writing practices, the study shows that dependence on AI tools often reduces engagement with culturally embedded linguistic forms such as keigo (honorific speech), relational politeness, and norms of omoiyari (empathic consideration). These features are not merely grammatical structures but carriers of historical, embodied, and affective cultural memory. When language is outsourced to machines, access to these deeper layers of meaning risks being diluted.

Situating these findings within broader debates on algorithmic mediation and migrant integration, the paper argues that AI-assisted communication may produce communicative survival without cultural participation. It concludes by proposing a critical pedagogy that integrates translation technologies reflexively while reaffirming language learning as a central pathway to belonging.

Aadya Sabu Ambika is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kerala, specialising in cultural memory and Japanese traditional arts. Her research examines how performative and aesthetic practices transmit, preserve, and reshape cultural memory across generations. Supported by national fellowships, she has conducted fieldwork in Japan, engaging with tea masters, Ikebana practitioners, and performance scholars to integrate ethnographic insight with memory studies. Aadya has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on cultural memory, performance, translation, and cultural studies, and is also an active translator and poet working across English, Malayalam, and Japanese. She has experience as a Japanese language tutor and visiting scholar, combining cross-cultural pedagogy with research practice. Her broader interests include cultural studies, audience reception, and the formation of cultural memory. She is currently developing new theoretical approaches to audience-generated memory in traditional art forms.

DAY TWO (October 4) 10:30 to 12:00

Book Talk: The Walls Have Eyes

10/4 Book Talk

The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Petra Molnar, York University

From robot-dogs to AI lie detectors to iris scanning in refugee camps, technologies are changing the ways people move. Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist PetraMolnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is a global story, a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation, borders are also big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market. The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes of the sharpening of borders around the globe, foregrounding the stories of people on the move and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.

Petra Molnar is a lawyer, anthropologist, and writer. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, where she directs the Migration and Technology Monitor Project, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in The Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024) and Border Necrotechnics: Automation, Surveillance, and the Racial Politics of Migration Control (2026).

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break

DAY TWO (October 4) 13:00 to 15:00

PANEL 3: Social media, AI, and Migration Imaginaries

10/4 Panel 3 (1)

Escaping First (#KaburAjaDulu): AI, Social Media, and Pre-Migration Imaginaries in Indonesia

Raihan Rizqi Aghniyaa, Chiba University

In recent years, migration patterns have been heavily shaped by social media environments and AI-driven platforms. Since late 2024 in Indonesia, a viral movement called #KaburAjaDulu (Let's Escape First) has dominated the social media sphere. This sentiment echoing widely among Indonesian youths, creates a growing desire to seek better opportunities abroad. This paper explores the intersection of AI-driven platforms and the construction of pre-migration imaginaries amidst Indonesia’s unstable socio-political and economic climate. The study investigates how AI algorithms in social media recommendation engines amplify “insightful” content from the Indonesian diaspora. By consistently curating idealized representations of living abroad, these algorithms shape a “neighbor’s grass is greener” imaginary that intensifies the urge to migrate.

Using a qualitative approach through digital ethnography and discourse analysis, this research argues that AI does not merely facilitate information, it also actively shapes the emotional and psychological state of potential migrants. Furthermore, this paper examines how the algorithmic response loop transforms structural frustrations such as limited job market and political instability into collective digital movement. When local conditions worsen, the AI-driven visibility of “successful” migration stories acts as a savior, blurring the line between organic aspiration and algorithmically induced desire. By analyzing the #KaburAjaDulu trend, this study contributes to the understanding of “belonging” in the age of AI, where the sense of home is increasingly deconstructed by digital narratives of escape.

Raihan Rizqi Aghniyaa is a first-year Master’s student at the Graduate School of Humanities and School of Public Affairs, Chiba University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese Studies from Universitas Indonesia, where her early research focused on media representation, notably published in the study “Femininity, Masculinity, Patriarchal Domination: Representations of Gender Relations in Television Drama ‘From Five to Nine’”. Her research interests have since shifted from gender studies to migration, inspired by her personal experience working as a blue-collar migrant in Australia under the Work and Holiday Visa program. This firsthand experience sparked a deeper academic interest in the lives of Indonesian migrants in Japan. Currently, her research focuses on the intersectionality between digital environments and the lived experiences of the Indonesian diaspora, specifically examining Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) participants. She explores how social media and AI-driven platforms shape the narratives and realities of contemporary labor migration.

10/4 Panel 3 (2)

Misinformation and the “Japa” Migration Narrative: AI-Driven Social Media Algorithms and Migration Aspirations among Nigerian Youth

Philip Egbule, University of Delta

In recent years, the popular Nigerian expression “Japa” a colloquial term referring to the urgent desire to migrate abroad has become a powerful social narrative shaping youth migration aspirations. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly structures the digital environments through which migration imaginaries are produced and circulated. This paper examines how AI-driven social media algorithms influence migration aspirations among Nigerian youth by amplifying particular narratives, images, and expectations about life abroad.

Drawing on the concept of digital migration imaginaries, the study explores how algorithmically curated content on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shapes perceptions of mobility, opportunity, and belonging. The paper employs a mixed qualitative approach combining digital ethnography, content analysis of migration-related social media posts, and semi-structured interviews with Nigerian university students and young professionals considering migration. Preliminary observations suggest that AI-driven recommendation systems often privilege aspirational and idealized representations of migration success, while downplaying the structural barriers and precarity migrants frequently encounter. Such algorithmic amplification contributes to the circulation of partial or misleading information about migration pathways, employment prospects, and living conditions abroad.

At the same time, migrants and diaspora communities increasingly use digital storytelling including humor, memes, and personal testimonies to challenge dominant narratives and provide counter-information. By situating the Nigerian “Japa” phenomenon within broader debates on AI-mediated information ecosystems and migration governance, this paper highlights the cultural and political implications of algorithmic media environments for contemporary migration decision-making. It argues that understanding AI’s role in shaping migration imaginaries is crucial for addressing misinformation, enhancing digital literacy, and supporting more informed migration choices among young people in the Global South.

Philip Onyekachukwu Egbule is a Nigerian. He holds a Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) in Economics/Geography (1997), B.Sc. (Ed.) (2004), and M.Sc. (Ed.) (2011) in Social Studies/Education. He lectures in the Department of Arts and Social Science Education, University of Delta, Agbor, Nigeria. As a social scientist and educator by training, his chief scholarly interests include globalization studies, African development, human rights, and gender issues. He is astute in research, which has resulted in the publication of 59 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals between 2013 and present. He has presented over 70 research findings at national and international conferences and workshops in his area of interest. He has received several awards, grants, and fellowships from various institutions and organizations, including the 10th European Conference of African Studies (ECAS 2025), Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (2025), funded, and the Summer University Course, Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary (2024), funded. He is curious minded, flexible, and endowed with the capability to cope in multicultural environments.

10/4 Panel 3 (3)

Anti-Foreigner Discourse in the Age of GenAI: An Exploratory Study Using Japanese Social Media Data

Fabiani Diletta, Sasakawa Peace Foundation

Amid immigration policy reforms and demographic decline, Japan’s public discourse around foreign residents is increasingly mediated by social media platforms and, potentially, by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). GenAI tools can create realistic text, images, and video at scale with minimal cost, lowering the barrier for dissemination of disinformation on social media.

This paper will investigate whether AI-generated anti-foreigner discourse is emerging on Japanese social media and, if so, assess their characteristics, trends, and the potential role of AI in their production.

Primary data will originate from X (formerly Twitter) and will be collected and analyzed through Meltwater, a professional-grade social listening tool. Data collection will cover a five-month period (April–August 2026) due to constraints around the tool’s contract and workshop deadline. Where necessary, findings may be supplemented by documented events and research beyond this period for a more comprehensive overview.

The study expects but does not presuppose the presence of anti-foreigner discourse in Japan’s digital environment. Furthermore, discourse may not involve GenAI usage beyond language translation. Should this be the case, the paper will look at comparable transnational evidence to identify emerging trends and develop informed projections applicable to Japan.

Beyond its potential findings on AI-mediated xenophobia, particularly on the underexplored Japanese case, this paper will offer practical methodological insights on using social listening tools to detect AI-generated content concerning migrant communities.

Diletta Fabiani is a research fellow at Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo, where she has been based for over a decade. Her research interests include international institutions, multilateral cyber and AI governance, and AI governance in Japan. She received a PhD in international studies from Waseda University (Japan) and an MA in international relations from the University of Bologna (Italy). She previously worked as a research associate and academic writing advisor at Waseda University and as a language lecturer at several universities in Tokyo. Her latest publications include “‘AI’s Best Friend’: the Japanese Government’s Narrative about AI” (Asiascape: Digital Asia, 2025) and the book chapter “Prospects and Challenges of Cyber and AI Governance in the QUAD, APEC, and G7” in the edited volume Statecraft and Governance in Cyberspace (2026).

10/4 Panel 3 (4)

Byte-Sized Love? Digital Companionship, Care, and Constrained Intimacy among Migrants in Japan

Clarise Ong, University of Tokyo

As artificial intelligence and digitally mediated platforms increasingly shape everyday social life, new forms of companionship are emerging through chatbots, virtual partners, and algorithmically generated interactions. While migration scholarship has long examined transnational communication and mediated care, the growing body of literature investigating how migrants may engage with emerging forms of AI-mediated companionship and digitally mediated intimacy remains sparse.

This paper thus introduces the concept of “constrained intimacy” to explore how migrants narrate emotional connection and companionship under structural conditions that limit opportunities for locally embedded intimacy and belonging.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship across areas such as migration studies, loneliness research, digital intimacy, and emerging work on fictosexuality and relationships with fictional or virtual characters, the paper argues that migrants often navigate emotional lives shaped by structural constraints such as linguistic barriers and limited local social networks. In such contexts, digitally mediated companions, ranging anywhere from AI chatbots to parasocial and fictive attachments, may function as affective infrastructures through which such individuals negotiate loneliness, care, and emotional support.

By bringing together these bodies of literature, this conceptual paper highlights an emerging but understudied dimension of migration in the age of AI: the role of algorithmically mediated companionship in shaping experiences of emotional belonging. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda for examining how migrants narrate relationships with digital companions and how these interactions reshape current understandings of intimacy, care, and social connection in contemporary migration contexts.

Clarise Ong Chia Yee is a Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholar and doctoral student in the ITASIA programme at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. She holds a Master of Arts in Global Studies from the University of Tokyo and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Nanyang Technological University. She previously worked as a research assistant and academic project supervisor for Nanyang Business School and National Institute of Education (Singapore). Her doctoral research focuses on the narration of emotional intimacy and companionship by migrants in Japan in relation to digital technologies and she is interested in qualitative research, digital technologies and communities, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture.

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

DAY TWO (October 4) 15:30 to 17:00

Roundtable: AI, migration, and the politics of digital futures

10/4 Roundtable

AI, migration, and the politics of digital futures

Moderated by Megha Wadhwa & David H. Slater Sophia University

The symposium closes with a roundtable that draws the two days into conversation. As algorithmic systems increasingly shape who moves, works, and belongs, where are these digital futures heading—and who gets to shape them? Bringing together anthropological, legal, and ethnographic perspectives, the discussants reflect on the promises and tensions raised across the panels, and consider what accountability, resistance, and rights might look like in an age of automated borders.

Discussants

Yuiko Fujita holds a doctoral degree in Communications from the University of London and an MA in Sociology from Columbia University. She is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo. Her research interests include culture, media, globalization, and gender. She is the author of Cultural Migrants from Japan: Youth, Media, and Migration in New York and London (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Her recent work includes “Everyday nationhood and digital media: Tracing identity among Japanese cultural migrants,” published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (2025).

Moderators

David Slater is a cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at Sophia University. Slater’s work spans social class and youth culture, disaster and recovery, urban studies, and civic participation. He currently studies the movement of refugees and migrants in the urban Kanto region and serves as director of Refugee Voices Japan. His most recent book, Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan: New Directions in Social Movements (2025), examines emerging forms of political engagement and social movement activity in Japan. He currently studies the movement of refugees and migrants in the urban Kanto region and is the director of Refugee Voices Japan.

Megha Wadhwa is a filmmaker, anthropologist, and author based in Japan, where she works as an Assistant Professor at Sophia University. Her research explores migration with particular attention to gender, identity, and belonging, and increasingly to how digital technologies and AI reshape migrant lives. She is the author of Indian Migrants in Tokyo: A Study of Socio-Cultural, Religious and Working Worlds (Routledge, 2021) and a regular contributor to The Japan Times. Her latest book chapter, "Contesting Invisibility: Stories of Indian Migrant Women in Japan," was published in Empirical Art: Filmmaking for Fieldwork in Practice (Manchester University Press, 2025). Trained in visual ethnography and fieldwork-based storytelling, she has directed several films, including Daughters from Afghanistan (2019), Indian Cooks in Japan (2020), Finding Their Niche: Unheard Stories of Migrant Women (2022), Home in the Making (2025), and Home, elsewhere (upcoming).

This conference is a part of Sophia Symposium funded by Sophia University and Organised by Institute of Comparative Culture, Sophia University Research Unit “Visual Studies and Displacement in/to Japan”

For further queries please contact: wadhwamegha@sophia.ac.jp