Digital Epistemologies of Resistance: African Migrant Women's Content Creation as Political Labor and Autonomous Knowledge Production

Abstract (English)

This paper interrogates how African migrant women in Britain mobilize digital platforms as sites of insurgent knowledge production, transforming YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook into radical archives that simultaneously document oppression and enact resistance. Situated at the intersection of feminist political economy (Federici, 2012; Duffy, 2017) and decolonial digital studies (Benjamin, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2014), I argue that these women's content creation constitutes a dual form of embodied labor and epistemic activism—one that disrupts the ontological hierarchies of mainstream migration scholarship (De Genova, 2017) while materially contesting border regimes.

The study emerges from urgent questions about whose knowledge counts in migration studies and how digital platforms are transforming resistance strategies. While existing research has examined migrant digital practices, few studies center African women's content creation as both political labor and knowledge production. My methodological approach combines digital ethnography with critical discourse analysis to examine 60+ migrant-produced videos and social media posts from 2020-2024. This includes: 1) platform analysis of how algorithmic architectures shape visibility; 2) close reading of narrative strategies in viral content; and 3) tracking how knowledge circulates through diaspora networks. By centering these digital artifacts as primary sources, the study challenges traditional research hierarchies that privilege institutional voices over migrant epistemologies.

The analysis advances three interconnected theoretical propositions. First, building on Mirzoeff's (2011) concept of countervisuality, migrant women's digital narratives operate as counter-cartographies of power, mapping the violence of UK immigration policies through visceral testimonials that expose contradictions between state rhetoric and lived precarity. Second, extending Nakamura's (2015) work on digital labor, this content creation represents an unremunerated affective labor of resistance, where emotional toll is offset by strategic utility in building transnational solidarity networks. Third, these practices constitute a decolonial epistemic intervention (Santos, 2014), challenging extractive research logics by recentering migrant women as theorists of their own conditions.

Through this multilayered approach, the study reveals how platforms become weaponized for insurgent ends despite their neoliberal architectures (Gillespie, 2018). Case studies show care workers exposing wage theft through viral "day in the life" videos that algorithmically bypass mainstream media gatekeepers, and mothers deploying hashtag campaigns that turn personal stories into collective challenges to the UK's £38k income requirement. These acts transcend individual storytelling to become infrastructure for contemporary migrant struggles, creating alternative systems of knowledge circulation when institutional channels fail.

The paper concludes by troubling anthropology's epistemic complicity through the lens of Tuhiwai Smith's (1999) decolonizing methodologies: When migrant women emerge as the most compelling theorists of border violence through their digital praxis, what new research paradigms and activist solidarities must follow? The study ultimately calls for scholarship that recognizes African migrant women not just as subjects of study, but as innovators of digital resistance strategies that demand both academic and political engagement.