Everyday Digital Geographies of Ghanaians in a Medium-Sized Superdiverse City: Exploring Intersectional Identities and Translocational Belonging

<p dir="ltr">This thesis explores the intersectional identities and translocational belonging of Leicester’s Ghanaian community through their everyday digital geographies. Literature on Ghanaians abroad highlights innovative strategies employed to negotiate their multispatial lives. Yet, geographers have not sufficiently engaged with how digital technologies reshape their everyday practices, intersectional identities, and multi-local belonging. Moreover, most scholarly engagements focus on dominant global cities with limited attention to superdiverse contexts where small Ghanaian communities are contributing to new patterns of social complexity. This thesis addresses these empirical gaps by bringing everyday digital geographies into conversation with translocational practices, highlighting transnational actors, institutions, and technologies that reshape everyday experiences. The research adopted a qualitative non-media-centric approach, using focus groups, one-on-one interviews, participant observations, and photographic evidence. Firstly, the research findings suggest that the digital’s ambivalent capabilities transform the diaspora’s daily encounters. Secondly, mediated representational enactments are reshaping intersectional and cross-cutting identity performances that are negotiated to maintain cultural distinction. Thirdly, Ghanaians are forging multi-local connections within interpersonal and organisational settings to sustain multiple overlapping belongings. These mundane practices, representational enactments, and network ties reconfigure identity performances and individual/collective perceptions of belonging whilst contributing to Leicester’s superdiverse character. Digital technologies are integral to how Ghanaians mediate their translocational lives and contribute to placemaking amidst intense diversification. These observations reinforce the intersectional and multi-local character of habitual practices by small migrant communities. I argue that the Ghanaian diaspora’s mediated practices complicate their identities and belonging in digital and offline spaces. The thesis advances the concept of mediated translocational belonging and invites further research into digitally enabled ,translocational practices that are constituted across multiple, overlapping, and rapidly changing spaces. Future research could combine these conceptual ideas with innovative methodologies to generate new knowledge about migrants’ digital geographies, intersectional identities, and multi-local belonging across superdiverse cities.</p>