REVIEW EXCERPT

“This is an excellent and engaging manuscript that fills a unique niche in the field. It is rigorous, original, and beautifully grounded in lived experience, which makes it both a scholarly contribution and a powerful teaching resource. Its combination of theory, methodology, and empirical richness makes it valuable not only for academic audiences but also for practitioners and policymakers. It will inspire students, challenge scholars, and open important conversations about migration, coloniality, and liberation in the digital age.”

ABSTRACT

Colonially Mediated Spaces and Beings addresses the intricate interplay between identity, mobility, and power, focusing on how these dynamics are mediated by omnicolonialism and reclaimed through interactional and sociodigital practices of resistance and belonging.

Ibnelkaïd first asserts that our lived experience of the world is fundamentally relational, dialogical, and situated. Identity is not fixed, but co-constructed through socio-affective interaction, embodiment, and mutual recognition. Individuals exist at the intersection of movement and attachment—across spaces, temporalities, and relationships—that give meaning and orientation to their lives.

However, as Ibnelkaïd shows, this nexus is disrupted by the omnicolonial matrix, which operates materially and ontologically to inhibit empathy, weaponize emotions, and alienate intersubjectivity. Exploring the specific case of high-skilled racialized migrants in Finland—country that ranked the happiest in the world for eight years in a row—the author analyzes how migration regimes in Fortress Europe enact racialized geographies and commodify life itself.

To critically explore these dynamics, Ibnelkaïd introduces Critical Phenomenology of Interaction (CPI)—a novel and robust framework for examining how digital-algorithmic technologies and capitalist-imperialist structures intersect in shaping our being-in-the-colonial-world. Using CPI, the author examines how micro-coloniality is not only (re)produced in everyday social interactions but also resisted—notably through cultural reclamation, intersectional allyship, and commnuity and self-care.

Written from the lived perspective of an Indigenous Amazigh migrant woman and scholar, this work is a global call for liberation. Liberation from colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. Liberation of the minds, the borders, the peoples.