The research network STS-MIGTEC and Utrecht University’s focus area Governing the Digital Society with its special interest group Digital Migration invite contributions at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), critical migration, security, surveillance and border studies, and related disciplines.

You can submit your papers either to specific thematic panels or to open panels (see detailed cfp).

Please include the title, abstract (up to 250 words), and authors of the paper, incl. affiliations and short bios (75 words). Specify if you propose your paper to one of the available thematic panels or to open panels and if you would like to participate on-site. The deadline for submissions is 14 December 2023.

Online with Valeria Ferraris, Associate Professor of Sociology of Law and Deviance, University of Turin.

The study of informality has deep roots in Southern theory, encompassing various disciplines from law (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 1987) to urban studies (De Soto, 1989) and urban economy (Broomley, 2000). These studies emphasize informality's multifaceted nature, encompassing diverse aspects such as informal practices, the absence of planning, and more. They also highlight a range of causes, actors, and motivations associated with informality. Recent developments in EU migration policy have seen an increase in the reliance on technology, accompanied by a significant degree of informality. This includes non-legal actions or undisclosed agreements with non-EU countries. This presentation aims to discuss the intersection of informality within border control and technology, using Italy as a case study. Italy's normative order in migration control policy is rooted in administrative rules and obscure executive powers that complement informal practices in managing and controlling migration.

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Roundtable: Darcy Alexandra (University of Bern), Andrew Gilbert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Jonathan Austin (University of Copenhagen)

Inspired by emergent discussions in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on experimental collaborations (Estalella and Criado 2018; Lippert and Mewes 2021), and making and doing (Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak 2021), this roundtable will focus on alternative co-creative research and dissemination strategies that have the potential to reach beyond the walls of academia and intervene in broader public discussions. Our quest for multi-modal collaborations and interventions has the primary scope to widen the reach of Migration and Border Studies scholarship and to facilitate knowledge production with societal partners such as media makers, artists and engagement with wider publics.

Moderation: Nina Amelung (ICS-ULisboa)

Organisation: Pedro F. Neto and Nina Amelung (ICS-ULisboa) and Ildikó Z. Plájás (University of Amsterdam)

Hybrid event. For attending online contact migtec.website@gmail.com by November 26, 2023.

Simon A. Cole specializes in the historical and sociological study of the interaction between science, technology, law, and criminal justice. He is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science, and he is a co-author (with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan) of Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Attempts to govern and control the movement of people across borders are shaped by temporal demands. More specifically, speed and acceleration are increasingly pursued as means for alleviating, and possibly overcoming, time-wasting and repetition in practices of border control. At the same time, however, population mobility depends on the incessant production of knowledge about border-crossers.

What is the relation between acceleration and knowledge production and what are the consequences of this pursuit for acceleration in migration management? How does acceleration transform and re-organize the processes of knowledge production about border-crossers? To articulate this issue, I will focus on the so-called ‘accelerated procedures’, which have been introduced in Member States in order to speed up the asylum process.

Temporalities of (non)knowledge production – The quest for acceleration in the asylum system

Lorenzo Olivieri (Department of Philosphie and Communication Studies, University of Bologna)

This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, south-eastern Italy, one of the largest agro-industrial enclaves in the country, employing tens of thousands of workers who live and labour in conditions of extreme precarity and exploitation.

Genealogies of containment: migrant labour, bonifica integrale and bio-carceral regimes in an Italian agro-industrial enclave

Irene Peano, Institut of Social Sciences, ICS – University of Lisbon

This paper is part of a larger project which considers the position of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers as subjects with health needs, entangled on the one hand in systems of border control and enforcement, and on the other seeking and accessing care within national health systems in Europe. Taking as an entry point the recent (2022) mass reception of Ukrainians fleeing the war in Poland, this paper draws attention to the infrastructural aspects of healthcare and border control, showing how they have come to mesh and intersect.

Infrastructures of health and border control. The case of Ukrainians seeking healthcare in Poland

Karolina Follis (Lancaster University)

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing use of predictive technologies to determine who is allowed at the border from visitors to immigrants to asylum seekers. With their credulous pledge to eliminate irregular entries at the border, these novel automated systems appeal to state and non-state actors who justify their use in the name of national security or efficient management of borders.

Making up the Predictable Border

Burcu Baykurt & Alphoncina Lyamuya, University of Massachusetts Amherst, US

In this paper, I look at the rollout of handheld fingerprint scanners to UK police forces which enable officers to remotely scan a person’s fingerprints against immigration databases at roadsides, street corners, and public parks (RJN 2021). I ask how these biometric technologies individuate and explore the consequences.

The Harms of Biometrics: Atmospheres of Fear and Cramped Space

Carys Coleman, University of Manchester

A growing number of studies draw on post-/decolonial literature to unpack the colonial and imperial underpinnings of technology in the managing of space and im/mobility of populations. This talk aims to contribute to debates on the Eurocentrism of STS studies on migration and borders.

I will first review existing post-/decolonial research on STS and migration and borders. I will then argue that attempts to remedy the Eurocentrism of the field has reproduced some of the fundamental problems in STS scholarship regarding the absence of the ‘non-West.’ After discussing the upshots of this absence in conceptual terms, I will invite for integrating ‘non-Western’ histories into our accounts for the role of technology in migration and border control.

Science-and-Technology Studies and its Enduring Eurocentrism: Bringing the ‘Non-West’ in

Beste Isleyen, University of Amsterdam

The politicised debates on the detention and deportation of migrant individuals within Europe often overlook the implementation of policies and laws and more specifically the role of infrastructures used to carry out deportations. Recent research has highlighted the relevance of studying the infrastructures accompanying practices of migration enforcement as a crucial part of the implementation process.

Infrastructures, including networks and materials, are used to deport people from various sites and through various means; they are part of the mundanity of border enforcement but are also used to enact violent state practices. This contribution adds to the theoretical debates with original empirical insights on deportation implementation processes in Switzerland. The ethnography followed Swiss street-level bureaucrats, caseworkers in migration offices as well as police units, in charge of planning and executing deportation orders.

Deportation Procedures in Switzerland: Infrastructural Performances

Lisa Marie Borrelli, Haute Ecole de Travail Social,HES-SO Valais-Wallis

Search-and-Rescue NGOs in the Mediterranean have been increasingly criminalized. This criminalization has chilled conversation about the real ethical dilemmas that the practice involves. What, if any, can be the adverse by-products of rescuing life at sea? In this article, we concentrate the dilemmas involved in SAR as seen from the perspective of rescuers. Our aim is twofold. The first is to map the dilemmas from a phenomenological perspective, as they are experienced by rescuers at sea.

The paper sheds light on the complexity and nuance of the ethical landscape of maritime rescue, revealing an intricate web of interactions acknowledged by rescuers as posing ethical challenges. The second aim is to offer a conceptual framework for what it is that SAR NGOs are, in fact, doing. We contextualize their actions within the larger terrain of ‘border externalization’, in which states have moved enforcement activities to extraterritorial zones, where human rights law ostensibly does not apply.

Floating sanctuaries: the ethics of search and rescue at sea

Itamar Mann (University of Haifa) & Julia Mourão Permoser (University of Innsbruck)

This paper explores how bureaucratic practices collaborate in making a person deportable within European deportation infrastructures. Drawing on months of ethnographic fieldwork in a deportation unit, the article focusses on the main daily work inside: file practices.

Bridging scholarship on street level bureaucrats and the materiality of paperwork, this article traces how daily file practices shape the deportable subject. It shows the relations that are (un)made as deportation files move along procedural trajectories, between not only case-workers and documents but also databases, police, whiteboards, quota, embassies, or airlines. Doing so, the paper elaborates how the relations gathered in file practices mobilize categories of populations, for example racialized or gendered. These insights show that the deportable subject is formed in a constellation of various populations, paradoxically so given the legal call to individualize the deportee.

Making Populations for Deportation: Bureaucratic knowledge practices inside a European deportation unit

Lieke Wissink (University of Amsterdam)

In 2020, the European Union Agency for Large-Scale Information Systems (EU-Lisa) announced the award of their most valuable the contract for the new Entry Exit System (EES) and the shared Biometric Matching System (sBMS) to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Little is publicly known about the companies and the AI-based technologies that they develop and implement at European borders.

In this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary methodology to analyse the companies that have been awarded contracts to implement data interoperability and AI at EU’s borders.

Neither opaque nor transparent: Algorithmic power at EU’s datafied borders.

Ana Valdivia (King’s College London), Claudia Aradau (King’s College London), Tobias Blanke (University of Amsterdam) and Sarah Perret (King’s College London)

This presentation introduces and develops the notion of “participatory detention” to conceptualise the cooptation of refugees into their own governmentality and control. Asylum seekers are treated as deceitful and untruthful subjects and yet, at the same time, they are constantly interpellated by humanitarian agencies and nudged to speak about their use of technologies as well as about their life coping strategies.

The talk critically engages with “digital innovation” in refugee governance, by investigating the digital unpaid labour activities that asylum seekers are pushed to do in the name of their own good.

Participatory detention: digital technologies and asylum seekers’ unpaid labour.

Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths University of London)

In this paper, we explore how satellites and drones co-produce the capacity to make Europe’s maritime borderzones visible and controllable. We synthesise Thomas Nail’s work on kinopolitics with ideas inspired by Foucauldian studies on governmentality to develop the following argument:

Satellites and drones are technologies of power embedded within a kinopolitical regime of maritime surveillance which strategises vision in attempts to govern subjects and objects on the move – attempts that challenge any clear-cut distinction between security controls and humanitarian interventions in the field border management.

Perceiving and Controlling Maritime Flows. Technology, Kinopolitics and the Governmentalisation of Vision

Georgios Glouftsios (University of Trento, IT) and Panagiotis Loukinas (Trilateral Research, UK)