Michele Ferris Dobles is a professor and researcher in communication and documentary filmmaking at the University of Costa Rica. Her research focuses on the intersections between communication technologies, media infrastructures, and human mobility. She studies the meanings, practices, and rituals of communication, with a special emphasis on the political and cultural dimensions of media technologies and their relationship to social inequalities and technological design.  She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago (USA) and a Master's degree in Documentary Production from Wake Forest University (USA), both of which were completed with the support of Fulbright scholarships. Her doctoral thesis received the 2023 Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) and was published as a book entitled Migration in the Digital Age: An Ethnographic Study, by Intellect Publishing and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. The book will also be published in Spanish by the University of Costa Rica.

Research project as CALAS fellow (Knowledge Laboratory “A Region in Motion: Accelerated Human Mobilities and Multiple Circulations in Latin America and the Caribbean”)

Title: The intermediate space of migration: exploring the coexistence of physical and digital spaces from Nepantla.

Abstract: This research proposes to explore migration from a perspective that transcends traditional notions of physical space, focusing on the intersection between the material and the digital. Based on Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space (1974), it recognizes that migratory spaces are not limited to physical infrastructures such as routes, borders, or shelters, but are also constituted by the experiences, symbols, and emotions of migrants. However, these theories, anchored in national paradigms, are insufficient to explain the complexity of contemporary migratory experiences. In view of this, we propose to integrate the theoretical-methodological concept of nepantla, a Nahuatl term developed by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), which defines an intermediate, fluctuating, and contradictory space useful for analyzing processes in transition such as human mobility.
The study seeks to understand how migrants experience coexistence between physical and digital spaces, generating what is referred to here as an “intermediate” space or nepantla. The aim is to analyze digital spaces (generated through smartphones, their applications, and interfaces) in relation to the physical spaces of migration in order to understand the intermediate spaces of migration. 
Methodologically, the research will be developed from a hybrid ethnographic approach that combines interviews, diaries, participant observation, and digital ethnography. The University of Guadalajara, due to its experience in migration studies and its strategic location, will serve as the headquarters for the fieldwork. The overall objective is to analyze how, in the contemporary migration experience, digital and physical spaces are interconnected in the production of an intermediate space. In this sense, the proposal seeks to broaden the field of migration studies by considering mobility as a practice that simultaneously inhabits and reconfigures both the physical and the digital.