Abstract
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.
If individuation is the process by which singularity arises (how a thing comes to be distinguishable from other human and non-human “things”), the question of biometric individuation is the question of how a biometric subject emerges from a multiplicity. I argue that this is not merely an issue of abstract data processes or discursive representations of identities but a question of materiality.
Moving away from the idea of a unified body that biometrics somehow fails to “read” or adequately represent, I first show how biometric individuation involves the convergence of material traces left by the fragments of matter that constitute a body. Secondly, I show how this process makes subjects visible in ways that expose them to isolation, confinement, and violence.
Under such conditions, I argue, people are pressured into strategies of seeking invisibility to survive being made visible by an atmospheric and oppressive form of biometric individuation. Seeking invisibility theorises a form of harm involving the curtailment of relationships within a person’s social and political world, as well as the experience of the space one inhabits as marked with blockages, impediments, and constraints to the way in which one can move through that world (Thorburn 2016).
The Harms of Biometrics: Atmospheres of Fear and Cramped Space
Carys Coleman, University of Manchester
About the event series
“STS-MIGTEC circle” is a small format which takes place once a month and which serves to reflect jointly on work-in-progress contributions related to the themes of interest to STS MIGTEC. The idea is to create a safe space for probing and experimenting with ideas, arguments, attempts of analysis, sense-making of empirical material.