Electoral politics at the digital dinner table: Intimate online spaces as sites of long-distance citizenship

Focused on how Brazilian migrants experienced the national elections of 2022 through everyday digital practices, this paper engages intimate online spaces as key – yet underexplored – sites for long-distance citizenship. Migration and media scholars have for long examined the infrastructural character of digital networks for how transnational families perform presence and care across long distances. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Brazilians living abroad during the electoral period of 2022, I argue that online spaces shared with family and friends are also central to how migrants negotiate and perform political duties and subjectivities. As the article shows, upholding electoral commitments and caring for personal relationships are practices that coexist and collide in transnational citizens' digital every day. Intimate entanglements of the personal and the political during times of contentious politics, therefore, inform careful approaches to online exposure, new forms of etiquette for mediated interaction, and micro-targeted tactics of electioneering. Though grounded in the narratives of Brazilians abroad, the analysis suggests that engaging intimate digital spaces as key sites of politics – diasporic or otherwise – may deepen our analyses of transnational citizenship and kinship elsewhere.