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 infor
mation
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 pro
ject
(Russo 2020; 2023; Grasso/Russo 2022), the ar
ticle
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 em
ploys
a combined Corpus-based Multimodal Critical
Discourse Analysis to social media discourse (Khosra
viNik
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.