The COVID-19 pandemic caught societies worldwide unprepared in 2020. In Austria, after a lockdown was decreed on 16 March 2020, educational institutions had to switch to a patched-up distance learning approach, which has been largely maintained to date. This article delivers empirical insights from an interdisciplinary mixed-methods research study that investigated university students’ perceptions of and experiences with distance learning as well as their educational (home) spaces during the pandemic in Innsbruck, Austria. It combines results from a quantitative survey conducted with 2742 students in early 2021 with a qualitative multi-method and longitudinal research study that accompanied 98 students throughout four data-collection phases in 2020. Results show a significant improvement since spring 2020 with both teachers and learners adjusting to the distance learning formats and the use of digital tools, yet students urgently desired a return to face-to-face teaching and university life, particularly for its social benefits. Strikingly, more than half of the participants wanted to maintain the option of overall distance education after the pandemic. Based on the perspectives of students, it is appropriate to demand significant changes in post-pandemic education adapted to the era of the post-digital, for which this article gives short-term as well as medium-term recommendations.

This article posits that analyses of (cyber)bullying among digitally connected young people need to explore the interdependences, intersections and cON/FFlation of bullying in ONline and OFFline spaces. It combines digital geographers’ works on relationalities between digital and offline spaces with studies on children’s and young people’s geographies and digitization as well as with interdisciplinary work on cyberbullying and traditional bullying in the school context. Drawing on narratives written by young people in Austria, the article lets participants speak through their own voices. There is an urgent need for disparate research examining either or both traditional and cyberbullying, to take note not only of each of their inimitable spatialities, but also their intersections. Through taking a perspective of cON/FFlating spaces we seek to produce a better understanding of the cON/FFlating nature and spaces of bullying in the digital era and to deepen the conceptualization of these interlinked and entangled socio-material-technological spaces.

This special section assembles perspectives on mobilities, migration and new media that emphasise mobile subjects’ multifarious involvements in overlapping digital spheres, which relate them socially and emotionally to both their home and destination countries. In this introduction, we identify two key themes that connect articles in this collection. First, authors accentuate migration and new media appropriation as a process involving liminal spaces characterized by transition, experimentation and tentativeness. Second, they analyse the subtle frictions that derive from migrants’ embeddedness in digital and offline social fields, shot through with power asymmetries that may simultaneously imply empowerment on one hand, and surveillance and control on the other. Authors draw on empirical case studies of transnational migration in foregrounding multiple mobilities within, to or from Asia.

Researching people in their chaotic and complex everyday lives is challenging for researchers at any time but especially during the application of social distancing measures. In this article, we make the case for the methodical potential of mobile messengers such as WhatsApp for qualitative mobile in situ research. We exemplify the productive use of the Mobile Instant Messaging Interview (MIMI), a research method developed by Kaufmann and Peil in 2020, to study participants’ everyday life in real-time. Based on two case studies from geography and communication studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we expound our experiences in the practical application of the MIMI approach and give recommendations. We conclude that MIMIs are a low-cost, easily feasible and short-term implemented approach for research interests across disciplines and possessing great potential for exceptional circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic. They allow direct access to the practices and experiences of people in situ and in real-time that would otherwise stay hidden and inaccessible to social sciences. The method is suitable for research projects of any size, and can be applied as part of multi- and mixed methods designs and as well for longitudinal designs. Nonetheless, the MIMIs have to be well prepared, demand smart ways of nudging participants into elaborating their responses and require careful coordination between larger teams of researchers.