ICT-enabled Refugee Integration: A Research Agenda

The recent phenomenon that has come to be known as the European refugee crisis is in reality a global problem. Accordingly, issues regarding refugee integration have become a central topic of debate worldwide. In this paper, we try to understand how refugees use information and communication technology (ICT) in different regions of the world to understand how ICT is supporting refugees’ desperate journey to safety, their stay in temporary settlement camps, and their post-settlement inclusion in host countries. With this goal in mind, we first conducted a series of interviews with Syrian refugees in Berlin, Germany to collect preliminary insights. Then, we organized panel discussions at two key information systems conferences (ICIS 2016 and ECIS 2017) involving participants from various countries. The panel discussions revealed seven key research themes: accessibility to information; availability of education and linguistic resources; admissibility to labor markets and entrepreneurship opportunities; communicability with home country; connectedness with local population; interactivity with host government; and volunteer coordination. We discuss how ICT might help to address issues related to each theme, present research questions relevant to each theme, and supply an illustration of how ICT has been employed to address an aspect of each theme. Insights gathered lead to: theoretical implications and future opportunities for research in the field of Information Systems; practical implications to be considered by different stakeholders interested in refugee integration; and social implications related to refugee crisis that cannot be ignored.     «

The recent phenomenon that has come to be known as the European refugee crisis is in reality a global problem. Accordingly, issues regarding refugee integration have become a central topic of debate worldwide. In this paper, we try to understand how refugees use information and communication technology (ICT) in different regions of the world to understand how ICT is supporting refugees’ desperate journey to safety, their stay in temporary settlement camps, and their post-settlement inclusion in...     »