Digital Literacy, Information Precarity, and Gendered Exclusion Among Ukrainian Refugee Women in Hungary

Abstract

This study examines how digitally literate Ukrainian refugee women in Budapest navigate information precarity within a restrictive migration-policy environment. While digital literacy is often viewed as a resource for navigating displacement, this study suggests that unstable, poorly localized, or inaccessible information continues to limit participants’ ability to access services and engaging with host-country systems. Drawing on 26 semistructured interviews, using a feminist sociotechnical systems (STS) framework, the study explores how migration governance and digital infrastructures exacerbate rather than reduce exclusion. Despite their digital competence, participants remained disconnected from local institutions, having no formal support and relying on translation apps and transnational networks. The study introduces the concept of relational information precarity to describe how emotional attachment to Ukraine, trust deficits, and perceived marginalization hindered engagement with the host society. It also develops the term digital sacrifice to describe how gendered caregiving responsibilities shaped participants’ access to and use of digital tools. These findings contribute to feminist STS and migration scholarship by extending critiques of techno-solutionism to the context of digitally proficient refugee women navigating integration without consistent institutional support.