Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement. Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff. Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 275 pp.
Digital Diasporas is a highly readable, provocative, and groundbreaking study of five diasporas in the United States: Afghan-Americans, Egyptian Copt-Americans, Tibetan-Americans, Somali-Americans, and Nepali-Americans.
To study these groups in the United States, author Jennifer Brinkerhoff, an associate professor of public administration and international affairs at George Washington University, monitored the online communication exchanges within these groups and back to their homelands. The question she asks is a poignant and apt one: “How do communities of migrants become diaspora communities and yet maintain identities that sustain at least psychological links to the homeland?”