This book investigates the ways in which emerging digital technologies are shaping and changing the worlds of sexuality and gender diverse youth in Southeast Asia. Primarily focused on the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, the book examines the potential of digital technologies to enhance wellbeing in and across these contexts. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic field research, interviews, survey data, and online content analysis, the book examines the design and use of websites and content by and for LGBT+ youth. The book innovatively interrogates the design of transnational digital wellbeing initiatives, alongside the digital practices of those the technologies are designed for. It illustrates not only the (im)possibilities of technological design, but also the capacity for design to participate in what Hanckel calls '(trans)national digital wellbeing' processes. He asks us to consider the ways that global technologies are contextual -- a paradox that is explored throughout the book. The analysis extends important discussions in youth research, contributing to a greater understanding of how LGBT+ youth are engaging new technologies to participate in identity-making, health and wellbeing, as well as political action. It also considers implications for digital wellbeing and digital health promotion efforts globally with young people who experience marginalisation. In doing so the book makes a critical contribution to understanding the ways that transnational digital interventions get deployed and (at times) incorporated into youth practices.

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from ‘real life.’ Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

This book consists of nine chapters, each an in-depth case study into a specific non-mainstream or marginalized online community in Malaysia. The authors come from diverse backgrounds to talk about how new media can both assist and hinder maligned minorities, ignored ethnicities or the often attacked migrants in their day to day lives. The book makes a strong contribution to Malaysian studies which highlights the other and represents minority viewpoints to challenge the belief that Malaysia’s online space is monolithic and limited to several mainstream discourses in Malaysian scholarship.

The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies is the definitive guide to the international, interdisciplinary, and intersectional field of Girls’ Studies, bringing together leading and emerging scholars across a range of academic disciplines to address timely topics on global girls and girlhoods. Spread across four thematic sections, the essays in this collection offer a glimpse into the evolution of the field, directly challenge and move beyond the field’s early shortcomings, provide compelling examples of current research, and suggest new directions for future Girls’ Studies scholars. Chapters explore the connections between girlhoods and such topics as sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, education, activism, social-class, ability, gender identity, media representation, and more. The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies is of value to scholars and students of gender studies, media studies, sociology, education, health, literature, sexuality studies, communication, child and youth studies, and more.

This book reflects on the role of social media in the past two decades in Southeast Asia. It traces the emergence of social media discourse in Southeast Asia, and its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratizing and authoritarian states. It explains the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments, and argues that social media is now an essential platform for control. The contributors detail the increasing role of “disinformation” and “fake news” production in Southeast Asia, and how national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but which often exacerbate the situation of state control. From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation explores three main questions: How did social media begin as a vibrant space for grassroots activism to becoming a tool for disinformation? Who were the main actors in this transition: governments, citizens or the platforms themselves? Can reformists “reclaim” the digital public sphere? And if so, how?

This provocative account of our immigration system's long, racist history reveals how it has become the brutal machine that upends the lives of millions of immigrants today. Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what leading immigrant rights activist and lawyer Alina Das calls the "deportation machine." The bulk of the arrests target people who have a criminal record -- so-called "criminal aliens" -- the majority of whose offenses are immigration-, drug-, or traffic-related. These individuals are uprooted and banished from their homes, their families, and their communities. Through the stories of those caught in the system, Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the U.S. constructed the idea of the "criminal alien," effectively dividing immigrants into the categories "good" and "bad," "deserving" and "undeserving." As Das argues, we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.