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This session continues the collaboration with the COST Action “Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control (DATAMIG)”.

DATAMIG is an interdisciplinary network aimed at fostering research by bridging spheres of discourse and public intervention surrounding data issues in European migration and border control.

DATAMIG Working Group 1 is currently working on a collaborative book titled "Migration Data Matters: A Keyword Approach to the Datafication of Migration and Border Control". In this project, scholars have come together to develop an inventory of critical scholarship through keyword-based chapters. These keywords, written by multi-author teams, highlight significant themes related to the digitalisation and datafication of migration, mobilities, and borders.

In the first Circle of the year, we will focus on the following chapters:

Imaginaries / Imagining, by Philipp Seuferling, Koen Leurs, Laura Candidatu, Nina Khamsy, and Zlatan Krajina

This keyword entry explores the conceptual powers of imaginaries, understood as an active, socio-material practice of imagining, in relation to datafication of migration. We discuss how socio-technical assemblages in the realm of migration are bound up with the work of imagination, and how seemingly non-material practices of imagining pasts, presents, and futures around technology in migration control are enwrapped with and shape material enactments of power. We understand imaginaries as the tension-rich, yet productive space between the representational and the material – between the signifier and the signified, a structure of feeling that is discursively articulated yet materially bound. By discussing the philosophical underpinnings of imagination as a social practice connected to hegemonies and their contestations (such as Taylor, Lacan, Strauss, Anderson, Castoriadis, Hall), we introduce how this conceptual history can be made productive to critically study contemporary datafication of mobility regimes – speaking to a moment where increased technologisation of border regimes leads to new power hierarchies over imagining as a social practice, e.g. when data itself is used to imagine migration and its futures. We then unpack the analytical capacities of imaginaries as a keyword on (loosely) three interrelated scales.
             On a macro-level, investigating the power of imagination in migration exposes the long history of how mobilities over spaces and territories have been imagined in particular ways in Western history, leading to technologies of control and discipline being imagined and shaped in particular ways. In contrast, there have always been other imaginaries (and technological practices) of people, territory and mobility produced from the margins, e.g. in Indigenous theories, or among travellers and Roma people. On a meso-level, we address how imaginaries manifest on an institutional level, in policies, patents for technologies, algorithmic registers, or states. States, polities and institutions are characterised by certain structures of feeling (Williams, 1970) that provide imagined frameworks for legitimising ways of doing, designing and building technologies of migration regimes. Thirdly, imaginaries can be traced on the micro-level. Drawing on ethnographic insights on everyday experiences of people on the move in relation to border technologies, demonstrates the inherent struggles and frictions of imaginaries. Perceptions from below, aspirations and artistic contestations demonstrate the inherent power imbalances and injustices in who gets to imagine mobilities, and what potential lies in subaltern imaginaries.

 In conclusion, this entry explores the potential of “imaginaries” as a keyword to critically capture a socio-material practice that gives meaning to materialisations of the border and its technologies. Imaginaries are never fixed, and re-imagining can be a process of hope for liberatory futures. Yet, any act of imagination is dependent on positions of power, hence we ultimately ask what imagining from below can look like, and how new actors enter the scene of imagining migration, e.g. through algorithmic forecasting.

Body, by Moé Suzuki and Nishant Shah

The bodies of migrants are a key to the datafication of borders.  Actors seeking to control migrants place increasing faith and investment into technologies to capture, quantify, calculate, and deter (certain) bodies on the move. Bodies become the objects of control, as border technologies seek to detect and control movement. In such endeavours, bodies are rendered as a source of information that is turned into data, for example through biometric technologies (Amoore 2006; van der Ploeg and Sprenkels 2011; Quinan and Hunt 2022). Treating the body as a source of information entails a performance of subjecthood and bodies in specific ways. For example, bodies pose as something that speaks the truth about a person (e.g. Aas 2006), reducing subjects to their bodies.
            Within critical studies of the datafication of migration ,this warrants critical examination of ‘the body’ and how it becomes an object of control as well as a vehicle for control. In this entry, we draw particularly on feminist and queer scholarship on technology, embodiment, and migration to investigate the relationship between the body and datafication. We organise the entry around six statements about datafication and the body: 1) Digital data is a form of prediction rather than description, 2) Embodied data realities need measures beyond scale, 3) There is no data without bodies, 4) Data and the body are both subject to manipulation, 5) Data is dated (e.g. Madörin 2022), and 6) The body is leaky (e.g. Chun 2016). More broadly, the six statements are united around the idea that the idea of the body as primarily a source of information and as something that can be turned into data is rooted in thought systems shaped by the colonialism and cartesian dualism characterising modern science and politics. Consequently, the ways in which the body is central to datafication of migration control, is rooted in racism and in a culture of mistrust towards migrants.

Political economy of datafication of migration, by Clemens Binder, Sara Bellezza, Olga Gheorghiev, Sarah Perret, Zuzana Uhde
Political economy as a keyword essentially addresses two aspects. First, it argues that we need to understand datafication of migration control as embedded in wider economic structures of mobility (De Haas et al., 2019). In that sense, datafication enables categorizations of mobility that are often derived along economic lines, such as tourists, labour migration or displacement (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018). Datafication thus should be understood as a result of considerations about political economies and how data can contribute to mobility inequalities that rest upon notions of income and class (Anderson, 2013). Second, the keyword focuses on economic aspects of the datafication, in particular with emerging private actors at the level of controlling mobility and borders through data infrastructures (Bigo, 2022; Zedner & Bosworth, 2022). This involves particularly the shifts in power and agency in shaping the infrastructures of datafied mobility control through an introduction of new actors and emerging logics of marketization (Hoijtink, 2014).
            Discussing the political economy of datafication hence means to interrogate how databases and datafied infrastructures enable a specific field of actors that shape these forms of control according to market logic. Looking both at levels of technological development (Binder, 2024; Perret, 2024) and maintenance or expansion of the databases (Glouftsios, 2021; Leese & Ugolini, 2024), this keyword addresses the actors at the play as well as changes in agency and practices engendered through the emergence of economic logics. This keyword thus focuses on public-private interactions in the context of datafication with a specific focus on the logics of marketization and economic profitability in order to understand how they shape datafication. In this sense, this keyword seeks to provide a novel perspective on data and mobility control which highlights the economic structures at play in datafied regimes of mobility control. Thus it also advances debates on public-private interaction, as it draws together debates about agency of private companies with wider political and economical considerations. Hence, this keyword could open future research avenues that highlight economic aspects of datafication and also problematize those in terms of their productiveness of inequalities.