GRFDT

Considerable work has been done in the field of diaspora studies recently. Nevertheless, due to the rising socio-economic and political challenges around the world, it is essential to revisit and question earlier theories. At present, when the world is facing a crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in all the spheres of life, most of the activities are moving solely to the virtual networking platform. In other words, the role of internet emerges to be more important nowadays, though already in the early 90-s Arjun Appadurai (1996) expressed the view that the electronic mediation transforms the pre-existing ways of communication. Hence, the focus here is to explore how it affects various diasporic communities. It becomes important to look into and to find out the challenges, as well as the opportunities of such engagement by the diasporic communities amid pandemic. Armenian diaspora will be considered as a case study.  It will be attempted to see if new social and political dynamics will enforce re-theorization of the term ‘diaspora’. For carrying out the research combination of quantitative research methods and tools will be applied. Historicized theory will be taken into consideration to better understand the conceptual shifts of the Armenian diaspora. In order to understand the changing nature of the diasoporic communities on the online platform, content analysis of groups on social networking sites will be carried out. Interviews with some active community members will be another asset to the paper.