Refugees are a group of people who suffer from general heteronomy. They are externally defined with the label of “refugee” and through the system of humanitarian aid; their live is under the control and regulations of others. Staying in “total institutions” like refugee camps, they suffer from restrictions on mobility, legal rights and self-determination and severe interventions into the self. The same is true for their representation. Throughout history, journalists and researchers from the Global North have represented refugees and have often failed to give voice to refugees’ own perspectives.  “The refugee” has been constructed either as a passive victim or as a dangerous intruder. However, as many studies have also shown, forced migrants are actors in their own right, who are actively organizing and planning their lives and their futures.

This all-encompassing heteronomy is nowadays countered by refugees’ use of social media and the internet. Through these media, people on the move can not only connect to a social network around the world but also represent themselves and give voice to their concerns.

In this paper, which is based on research with refugees from the Global South in Germany and Kenya, I want to show how refugees counter this heteronomy with their self- representation through social media and the internet. In analyzing their media usage, I want to show how they represent themselves online, how knowledge is circulated and transformed in their Social media circuits, how this gives them larger capacity to change their lives and how their representation changes the view and perspective in the Global North.

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In the global competition over the migration of talent (Ette & Sauer, 2010, p. 22; Jöns 2009; Kim 2009), academic mobility has increased worldwide. The higher education programmes of the European Union set more than 250,000 people on the move each year (DAAD, 2014). Knowledge circulation has already become a buzzword in the scientific debate on the migration of academics (Jöns, 2009). The research agenda is increasingly dominated by topics such as transcultural and transnational experiences of teaching and learning practices, intercultural opening, diversity and the internationalisation of universities (Hahn, 2004; Karakaşoğlu, 2012), cross-border lifestyles and networks (Schmitz, 2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2017), multilingualism and hybridity (Hu, 2016, pp. 257-269).

This paper focuses on the circulation of knowledge through academic mobility in the Global South. Knowledge is understood as academic as well as mobility knowledge. Both types of knowledge provide important and necessary competences facilitating mobile action and to be mobile (capacity to act; Stehr, 2012, p. 1237). This type of knowledge is used by students or academics in various socio-cultural situations as a concept to support individual (mobile) career paths and to network in a transnational context. The dynamic interaction in these networks contributes to the circulation of transcultural phenomena and cross-border experiences between different (geographical) locations (Schmitz/Schönhuth 2019). In particular, I will examine the question of what kind of transcultural knowledge can be generated in this mobility context and how this knowledge can be circulated between different localities. How can it be exchanged as “network capital” (Urry, 2007) between the network members and how can the gained transcultural knowledge be used as cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983) by the actors to shape their own career opportunities in the country of origin.

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