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)

During my fellowship stay at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS, september ’20 – June ’21), I worked on a monograph titled “Digital migration”. With digital migration studies I refer to an interdisciplinary research area emerging at the intersections of media, migration and technology studies. Digital migration addresses ontological implications of the growing digitization and datafication of human mobilities within countries and across borders.

It is also concerned with epistemological, methodological and ethical questions emerging from digitally studying these mobilities. Ontology, epistemology, and ethics are inherently related as “migrants” come into being as a category through spatial, legal, symbolic and technological moves including crossing borders, work visas, refugee status determination and monitoring, surveillance and control.

Digital migration – work in progress

Koen Leurs (Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University

Considering the increasing ubiquity of digital technology in people’s everyday life and particularly the emphasis on the digitalization of migration governance, scholars working in the field of media and digital migration studies argue that the use of mobile phones during and after the migration journey influences the whole migration experience.

This paper contributes to such work by focusing not only on the usage of such technologies but also on the processes of design, development, and implementation.

Design, development, implementation and usage. Studying App infrastructures and their shaping of migrants’ practices of navigation

Olga Usachova (Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padua)

Numerous new developments are under way to make visible who is travelling to Europe. Such developments concern technologies used to monitor and control mobility and borders in Europe, to make known presumed invisible phenomena of border crossings.

Research on technologies of bordering however have a tendency to focus only on the invisibility of people. Less attention has been given to the invisibility of those same infrastructures that allow the informational management of mobility, migration and border.

Yet bringing the infrastructure itself to the foreground is needed, as infrastructure has a major role in how people are not only represented, but enacted. We therefore propose a new method and tool to address the invisibility of digital infrastructures used at the border.

Ontology Explorer: A method to analyse data models for identifying and registering border crossers

Wouter van Rossem (Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of Twente) & Annalisa Pelizza (Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna)

Ethnography is hard. While this is true for any given research domain and its “field”, ethnographic work in security fields has been branded as particularly challenging. Security ties to characteristics of secrecy, hard-to-access, or hyper-masculinity.

Our initial research interest was to empirically reconstruct these challenges by conducting interviews with social scientists who have conducted ethnographic research in and on various domains of security. Our material very much reflects the well-established assumptions about the characteristics of security as a field.

Throughout our analysis, we did however come across several surprising “cracks” or “fissures” in the alleged monolithic and impenetrable security surfaces that our informants had dealt with. In particular, we were surprised by interviewees’ accounts of how sites and actors of security temporally dissipate, reveal fissures, open up ambiguities, or create spaces of in-between-ness. In this paper, we are going to sketch out these “cracks” and “fissures” to complement the predominant perspectives about security as a field with a slightly different picture.

Cracks in the security wall: unexpected lessons from researching the “field”

Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Paul Trauttmansdorff (Department of Science & Technology Studies, University of Vienna) & Matthias Leese (Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich)

Conducting an ethnography of a state assemblage of migration and border control faces the problem of tackling an extensive, complex and rhizomatic ecology and brings the question to the fore how to reassemble its multiple worlds, entities, practices and issues. Referring to work on ontological methodology and based on a praxeography of the Moria Hotspot this paper suggests to use various mapping strategies that study heterogeneous actors, multiple worlds and their entanglements in a symmetrical and situated way.

While mapping may situate and trace multiple borderings and their forms of in-/exclusion, they also produce borders by following particular trajectories, assembling particular representations and bringing particular alternative forms of becoming into play. Therefore, this paper suggests to invert the orderings of each mapping and to look out for variations of enactments, tensions between actors and translation errors within the trajectories of circulation.

“Disentangling Assemblages of European Border Control through Praxeographic Mapping”

Silvan Pollozek (Digital Media Lab, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Germany)

This text considers the pairing of infrastructure and imagination, looking at how the two have been explored in studies of infrastructure to date, and working to explore them further through a set of examples centered around both imagined and actual instantiations of interventionist infrastructures for freedom of movement within and around the Mediterranean Sea.

It does so by engaging with current discussions within studies of infrastructure, and also through closer study of the interventionist-oriented infrastructural projects Watch the Med and Alarmphone, as well as architect Adrian Lahoud’s speculative Project for a Mediterranean Union (2010).

“Infrastructure and Imagination: learning from practices of interventionist infrastructuring and capacity building”

Eric Sodgrass (TEMA-T, Linköping University, Sweden)