By Mizan Rehman
Chittagong | August 10, 2026
For a people denied citizenship and dispersed across borders, what does “home” mean when returning home is no longer physically possible?
A research seminar at the University of Chittagong on Monday explored how Rohingya and other displaced communities are using digital technologies not simply to communicate, but to maintain family ties, preserve memories, articulate political identities and construct forms of belonging across geographical boundaries.
The Refugee and Migration Lab (RML) hosted the seminar, led by Dr. Suruchi Mazumdar, a Short-Term Visiting Fellow at RML and Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham Malaysia.
Her presentation examined how marginalised and exiled communities in the Global South, particularly geographically dispersed Rohingya, negotiate social media platforms, artificial intelligence and data-centred technologies while making claims to citizenship, identity and national belonging.
Faculty members, researchers and students attended the seminar at the Social Science Faculty Conference Room. Professor Sahid Ullah of the University of Chittagong participated as the designated discussant.
A Homeland Beyond Territory
The Rohingya have experienced decades of exclusion, persecution and forced displacement in Myanmar. Today, large Rohingya populations live across Bangladesh, Malaysia and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, often without recognised citizenship or secure legal status.
Much research on Rohingya displacement has focused on humanitarian assistance, statelessness, security, citizenship and refugee policy.
Dr. Mazumdar’s research turns attention to another dimension: the ordinary digital practices through which displaced people maintain relationships, remember places and people, reproduce cultural life and make sense of belonging in exile.
Her work approaches digital technology as more than a practical communication tool.
Phones, social media, videos, photographs and digital archives can become spaces where displaced families preserve memories, maintain relationships across borders and generations, and narrate experiences that might otherwise disappear from public and family histories.
This is where the idea of a “digital homeland” becomes significant.
For communities physically separated from their ancestral homeland, digital spaces can help sustain connections to family, collective memory and identity even when territorial access has been severed.
The concept does not suggest that an online homeland can replace citizenship, land or the right to return. Rather, it helps explain how displaced people continue to produce a sense of belonging under conditions in which formal political membership and territorial security have been denied.
Family, Memory and Everyday Digital Life
Dr. Mazumdar’s research draws on qualitative interviews with refugee digital content creators and civil society actors, digital ethnographic research, and analysis of social media content and user-generated videos.
One important area of inquiry concerns what might be called digital family-making.
Displacement separates families across camps, cities and national borders. Digital technologies allow relatives to remain connected, record important family events, exchange photographs and videos, preserve memories and transmit family histories to younger generations.
These activities may appear ordinary, but under prolonged displacement they acquire particular significance.
Photographs stored on a mobile phone, videos shared among relatives, recordings of family events and digital conversations across borders can become informal archives of lives disrupted by forced migration.
For stateless communities, such archives may also preserve forms of identity that official documents and state institutions fail to recognise.
Digital life therefore becomes connected not only to information but also to memory, emotion and continuity.
Beyond the Idea of Digital Liberation
A central argument of the seminar challenged overly celebratory accounts of technology and migration.
Digital platforms are often presented as empowering refugees and diasporic communities by allowing people to communicate across borders, access information, mobilise politically and bypass traditional gatekeepers.
Those possibilities remain important.
But the rapid expansion of digital technologies in humanitarian governance has introduced another reality.
Biometric registration, digital identification, artificial intelligence, databases and data-driven aid systems are increasingly used by governments and humanitarian organisations to identify, categorise and manage displaced populations.
Such systems can improve service delivery and administrative efficiency. At the same time, they raise questions about surveillance, consent, privacy, data ownership and the power institutions exercise over refugee populations.
The same refugee who uses a smartphone to communicate with family may also encounter digital technologies through biometric registration, databases and institutional monitoring.
Connectivity and control therefore exist simultaneously.
Dr. Mazumdar’s approach seeks to move beyond a simple opposition between technology as liberation and technology as surveillance.
Instead, her research asks how refugees themselves inhabit, negotiate and reshape digital environments in everyday life.
The Importance of Affect and Creativity
One of the seminar’s central interventions concerned affect—the emotional dimensions of digital experience.
Research on refugees and technology frequently concentrates either on technological empowerment or on surveillance and institutional control.
Both are important, but neither fully captures what refugees actually do with technology in their everyday lives.
People use digital platforms to mourn, remember, celebrate, maintain relationships, express longing, document family histories and imagine futures.
For displaced Rohingya, these emotional and creative practices matter because forced migration disrupts more than physical residence.
It disrupts neighbourhoods, kinship networks, social institutions, cultural transmission and the everyday relationships through which belonging is produced.
Digital technologies can partially reconnect those fragmented worlds.
A family photograph, an old village video, a conversation between relatives in different countries or a piece of Rohingya-produced digital content may therefore carry meanings far beyond its immediate technological function.
Such practices demonstrate that refugees are not simply passive recipients of technological systems designed by governments, corporations or humanitarian agencies. They are themselves producers of digital culture.
Who Controls Refugee Data?
The seminar also raised broader questions about data justice.
Refugee governance has become increasingly dependent on data. Humanitarian organisations and governments collect biometric information, identity records and other forms of personal data to manage assistance and refugee populations.
Traditional debates about data justice often focus on privacy, security and consent.
Dr. Mazumdar’s research suggests that another question must also be asked: who has the power to create, preserve and control the narratives represented through digital systems?
Institutional databases typically see refugees through administrative categories—beneficiary, household member, registration number, asylum seeker or data subject.
Everyday refugee-created digital archives reveal a very different form of knowledge.
They contain relationships, memories, cultural practices, emotions and personal histories that cannot easily be reduced to administrative data.
Recognising this distinction has implications for humanitarian policy.
Refugees should not be understood merely as populations to be registered and managed. They are also communities actively producing knowledge about themselves and preserving histories that official systems may overlook.
A Rohingya Question of Citizenship
The discussion is particularly relevant to the Rohingya because their displacement is inseparable from the denial of political membership in Myanmar.
For decades, Rohingya have faced restrictions on citizenship, movement, education and other fundamental rights. Large-scale military violence in 2017 drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, while renewed conflict has caused further displacement in recent years.
Digital belonging cannot resolve those political conditions.
A Facebook page cannot restore confiscated land. A digital archive cannot grant citizenship. Online communication cannot guarantee freedom of movement or physical security.
But examining digital practices reveals something that conventional refugee policy can easily overlook: statelessness does not eliminate people’s efforts to maintain community, memory and belonging.
Rohingya continue to narrate who they are even when states deny their identity.
They continue to preserve histories even when displacement separates them from the places where those histories were formed.
And they continue to imagine collective futures despite prolonged uncertainty.
This is what makes the idea of the digital homeland analytically useful.
It shifts attention from refugees solely as victims of displacement or subjects of humanitarian management toward the social and cultural practices through which displaced communities continue to reproduce collective life.
Technology Cannot Replace Rights
The seminar nevertheless underscored an important limitation.
Digital connection should never be treated as compensation for political exclusion.
For Rohingya, meaningful belonging ultimately remains connected to unresolved questions of citizenship, rights, security, land, recognition and the possibility of living freely in their homeland.
The significance of digital practices lies elsewhere.
They show how a displaced population responds creatively to prolonged statelessness while maintaining relationships with people, memories and places from which they have been separated.
Digital technology can therefore operate simultaneously as a space of connection, cultural preservation and political expression—and as an infrastructure of surveillance, classification and control.
Understanding Rohingya digital life requires holding these realities together.
The seminar at the University of Chittagong offered precisely that perspective: technology is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive. Its meaning emerges through the institutions that govern it and through the everyday practices of the people who use it.
For the Rohingya, those everyday practices increasingly form part of a larger struggle to preserve memory, sustain community and articulate belonging in a world where their formal citizenship remains unresolved.
