“Why don’t We Trade Places… ”: Some Issues Relevant for the Analysis of Diasporic Web Communities as Learning Spaces

Understanding the learning process as an aspect of the participation in various communities of practice (Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) helped educational researchers to explore learning contexts beyond school-based environments. In that sense, the participation in diasporic web communities could be interpreted as a particular learning experience: by participating in diasporic online spaces dispersed people learn and re-learn what it means to be an immigrant, how to understand and interpret immigrant experience, or imagine a relationship between the homeland and hostland. The identity-changing nature of online participation warrants a close analysis of web communities, which, along with other online/offline environments, could be involved in the construction of immigrant experience. For this reason, web communities, produced by socio-economic, cultural and migration flows, and mediated by the development of internet technologies, should attract attention of educational researchers. However, there is a need to address various issues that emerge in the way we are approaching the issue and conceptualize such a communities.

While the problematization of discourses advocating the transformative potential of web communities has been prevalent in the recent literature, the discourses of political and cultural promises and troubles of diasporic online networking are still being relatively unchallenged. Popular images of diasporic web communities as spontaneous and natural, and “an obvious goldmine” of the Net need to be problematized, as Jones (2002) points out, since they presume the deterministic nature of ethnic ties, allowing us to forget that “communities are very much constructed no matter how organic they may seem” (p. 371).