STS-MIGTEC Workshop 2024: Data Matters in Migration and Border Control
8 & 9 April 2024
Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University & Online
Call for Papers
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, which are concerned with (but not limited to) the following themes:
How do migration and border technologies shape transnational migration and border regimes? Which epistemic practices manifest or counter migration management/control regimes? What are the material politics involved and what power effects do such entanglements produce?
What data infrastructures of migration and border control emerge; how are these configured alongside intersecting grids of power such as race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, nationality, age, and generation, and in which ways can they be contested?
How are migrant subjects affected by migration and border technologies? How do migrant subjects enact, subvert, and appropriate them? What role do alternative civic technologies and infrastructures enacted by migrant subjects or other actors in solidarity play?
Which role do digital technologies play in the governance of asylum and humanitarian protection? What role do media platforms and infrastructures play for Ukrainian refugees in accessing protection? To what extent is the support for Ukrainian refugees based on existing socio-spatial networks and digital infrastructures?
Which role does technology play in the increasing convergence of immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system? How do information systems and underlying epistemic practices change power dynamics and affect immigrant rights?
How is open source intelligence (OSINT) through social media, online forums or satellite imagery becoming relevant for both governance and public scrutiny in contexts of war, persecution and migration?
Which kinds of polities and administrative assemblages emerge from security practices and infrastructures of registering, categorizing, and sorting? To what extent can we detect long-term lineages of oppression, for example dating back to colonial practices of differentiating between populations and to what extent are institutional transformations observable? Which epistemic orders are likely to emerge and stay?
How can we critically and publicly engage with migration and border control technologies and infrastructures? What can the methodological and conceptual repertoire of STS and related fields add to engage critically with human rights issues, inequalities, and publics? What role do science and critical scholars have in that process and what can they learn from civil society?
You can submit your papers either to specific thematic panels (see descriptions below) or to open panels (addressing the themes above):
Thematic panels:
Panel 1: Legal Challenges in Datafying EU Migration, Asylum and Border Management
Niovi Vavoula, Queen Mary University of London, n.vavoula@qmul.ac.uk
Panel 2: The technopolitics of digital crimmigration control: Expertise, experimentation, and democratic politic
Samuel Singler, University of Essex, samuel.singler@essex.ac.uk
Nina Amelung, Universidade de Lisboa, nina.amelung@ics.ulisboa.pt
Sanja Milivojevic, University of Bristol, sanja.milivojevic@bristol.ac.uk
Panel 3: Being Political? Navigating criticality and dissent with(in) and beyond STS
Stephan Scheel, Leuphana University, stephan.scheel@leuphana.de
Jasper van der Kist, University of Viadrina, vanderkist@europa-uni.de
Panel 4: The impact of open-source and other digital evidence on the governance of asylum and criminal justice in the context of war and persecution
Maarten Bolhuis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, m.p.bolhuis@vu.nl
Submission procedure
Please submit paper proposals to migtec.website@gmail.com (subject: STS-MIGTEC/PC Workshop paper proposal). In case you submit a proposal to one of the thematic panels please additionally cc: the panel convenors.
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.
Schedule
14 December 2023 – Deadline to submit paper abstracts
Early January 2024 – Notification about acceptance of papers
31 March 2024 – Deadline to submit short papers (of approximately 4000 words)
8-9 April 2024 – Workshop (hybrid)
Fees & travel grants
There is no workshop fee. Lunch, coffee breaks and dinner need to be paid individually. We are pursuing opportunities to accommodate scholars who seek financial support to attend the event. If you wish to apply for a grant, please indicate your interest with your submission. The grants aim to support researchers who lack funding otherwise. We cannot guarantee that all requests for travel grants will be granted.
Organization
The annual workshop is brought to you by the STS-MIGTEC network with support from Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture; the Graduate Gender Programme and the UU Governing the Digital Society (GDS) focus area, in particular its special interest group on digital migration.
Workshop organizing team:
Koen Leurs, Jasper van der Kist, Nina Amelung, Olga Usachova, Silvan Pollozek, Kinan Alajak, Ivan Josipovic
Thematic Panel 1: Legal Challenges in Datafying EU Migration, Asylum and Border Management
- Dr. Niovi Vavoula, Queen Mary University of London, n.vavoula@qmul.ac.uk
The past few decades have seen the significant rise in highly intrusive technologies which enable the processing of personal data of almost the entirety of foreigners. Biometric identifiers are routinely collected to enable identification and various Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are mushrooming promising to enable predicting migration, assessing the degree of riskiness different groups of foreigners pose and streamlining migration and asylum procedures. The datafication of migration, asylum and border management poses significant challenges for various fundamental rights, such as the rights to privacy and data protection, procedural rights, such as the right to an effective remedy and the right to good administration and the principle of non-discrimination. This panel will provide an overview of these challenges through a selection of topical issues, such as the processing of facial images for facial recognition purposes, algorithmic profiling in EU large-scale IT systems and procedural safeguards in algorithmized asylum procedures.
Thematic Panel 2: The technopolitics of digital crimmigration control: Expertise, experimentation, and democratic politics
- Samuel Singler, University of Essex, samuel.singler@essex.ac.uk
- Nina Amelung, Universidade de Lisboa, nina.amelung@ics.ulisboa.pt
- Sanja Milivojevic, University of Bristol, sanja.milivojevic@bristol.ac.uk
The fields of criminal justice and border control are key sites for enacting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in democratic societies. Both fields are undergoing rapid digitization, promoted by a complex network of public and private developers of new digital tools. Simultaneously, the boundary between these fields has become blurred due to their merger into what border criminologists now call a system of ‘crimmigration control.’
This panel critically examines the implications of digital bordering for democratic politics by inquiring into the interaction between border control technologies and criminal justice. We understand democratic politics as political decision making dedicated to principles of justice, rule of law, inclusion, political representation, fairness, and democratic governance committed to values of accountability and transparency. However, democratic political systems fail to keep up with the ideals they promote. Upholding rights and due process protections in the criminal justice system is especially important, to avoid misuse of public authority and ensure democratic legitimacy. Yet, research has shown that criminal justice practices are being reshaped by the introduction of new digital technologies originally intended for use in border control contexts. Function creep, whereby border control tools are later deployed for law enforcement purposes, is ubiquitous. As criminal justice systems are being reshaped by the introduction of digital border control tools, and these tools themselves have been developed by public and private technical experts, these experts have an increasingly influential—yet also indirect and inadvertent—role in shaping the boundaries of democratic political decision making.
The increasing influence of technical experts on practices of border control and criminal justice, combined with the rapidity of technological innovation, also raises the question of how academics should respond to these developments. Should researchers confine themselves to critiquing already-operational systems at a distance, or should they focus on and engage with anticipatory governance about future developments and promises as well? Should academics become a part of the technology creation process and seek to close the distance between practice and critique, or avoid such collaboration? We invite submissions focusing on the interplay between technical expertise, democratic politics, e.g. political decision making and democratic governance committed to values of accountability and transparency, and digital crimmigration control, addressing such topics as:
- How do digital technologies circulating from law enforcement into border control and vice versa shape criminal justice and border control practices respectively?
- What are the implications of digitizing crimmigration control for democratic politics, e.g. politics committed to democratic values such as accountability, legitimacy, transparency, inclusion, participation?
- How do private and public technical experts shape crimmigration control practices?
- What happens to democratic values of public accountability, transparency and legitimacy in the criminal justice system when private technical expertise drives technical innovation at the digital border?
- How should we practice critique of digital crimmigration control? What are the moral dilemmas involved when trying to follow Donna Haraways’ suggestion to “stay with the trouble” in this particular ambiguous contexts and how can we navigate them?
Thematic Panel 3: Being Political? Navigating criticality and dissent with(in) and beyond STS
- Prof. Stephan Scheel, Leuphana University, stephan.scheel@leuphana.de
- Dr. Jasper van der Kist, University of Viadrina, vanderkist@europa-uni.de
In the past decade an intellectually inspiring dialogue has evolved at the intersection of STS and critical border, migration and security studies. Since border and migration management, as well as migratory practices, have become increasingly digitalized and technologized, critical scholars have turned to STS for valuable insights and approaches. However, as Maria Puig de la Casa aptly points out, ‘nothing comes without its world’.
Many concepts and approaches in STS have been developed in relatively consensual and irenic locations like the laboratory or the hospital. But their real test lies in their application to sites and situations that are teeming with power struggles, political contestation and characterized by mechanisms of control, domination and coercion – such as detention centers, biometric borders or airports security checkpoints.
After all, STS teaches us that everything transforms as it travels and gets translated from one situation to the next. Starting from this key insight, this panel proposes that the dialogue between STS and other fields should not degenerate into a blind applicationism or an intellectual one-way street. Rather, we see the encounter with the research topics, questions and concerns of other fields such as critical border, migration and security studies as a chance to develop, refine and rethink concepts and approaches from STS into new directions.
For instance, how to remain sensitive to borders and boundaries with an approach that thinks in terms of networks and fluids? How can we shift our focus from the practitioners and experts cherished by STS who mobilise powerful assemblages, technological devices and evidence to the tactics and practices of those who inhabit marginalized and excluded positions? And finally, how do we maintain critical and political engaged with(in) a field that pre-defined eschews notions of power, politics or relations of domination? Is the preference for a flat ontology tenable in highly power-saturated research contexts that have been shaped by colonial domination, performances of sovereign power and intersecting manifestations of racism, capitalism, sexism and other expressions of domination and violence?
Thematic Panel 4: The impact of open-source and other digital evidence on the governance of asylum and criminal justice in the context of war and persecution
- Dr. Maarten Bolhuis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, m.p.bolhuis@vu.nl
Digitalization increasingly affects the governance of asylum and humanitarian protection in Europe, pushed by a more general trend towards digitalization of bureaucracies, and an increasingly dominant logic of national security and crime control. The need to adapt bureaucratic processes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a further catalyst. Digitalization touches on all domains of migration and asylum: from forecasting migration patterns to advanced border control through document verification and behavior recognition, remote hearing, the use of open-source intelligence, speech recognition and analysis of data from mobile devices to inform decision-making, and the use of digital tools for immigration detention, relocation, and settlement.
With increasing access of both migrants and governments to digital technology, public actors can benefit from an abundance of information generated by private actors that was not accessible before. Better access to information has the potential to improve decision-making and access to protection, for instance by reducing human bias and arbitrariness in decision-making. The increasing access to and use of digital technology also offers a potential for more accountability and better public scrutiny, for instance because it allows private actors to report on the behavior of public actors in border control. Despite this potential, digitalization also raises concerns, for instance regarding the privacy of migrants, bias in algorithms and decision-making, and mission creep.
This panel seeks to shed light on a variety of developments in this area.