Navigating with nuance the intricate relationships between mobility, identity, and power structures, Samira Ibnelkaïd presents a novel framework that challenges dominant narratives that frame migration as a crisis and racialized individuals as threats, arguing instead for the importance of translocal networks of belonging and collective emotional, sensory and epistemic intelligence.

Colonially Mediated Spaces and Beings focuses on the experiences of high-skilled racialized migrants in Finland – a country ranked as the “happiest in the world” seven years in a row – as a case study to demonstrate how the omnicolonial matrix seeks to alienate migrants from their heritages and force them into oppressive categories of economic utility and racialized stereotypes, hindering their growth.

Drawing on anticolonial theoretical, historical, methodological and empirical resources, Ibnelkaïd proposes a critical phenomenology of interaction to analyze how oppressed individuals both experience and resist the omnicolonial matrix in their (digitally mediated) everyday social interactions. Rather than fully submitting to these oppressive forces, she finds, individuals also challenge the system by enacting sites of resistance and belonging that defy capitalist logics of commodification and exploitation.