From knowing to mattering: How do issues of science and technology in migration control become matters of care and concern?

Abstracts

Paying attention to the asymmetries of power to neglect and contest issues: precarious publics of biometric databases in migration control. 

by Nina Amelung, Institute of Social Science, Universidade de Lisboa

Migrants affected by measures of border control and related technologies and infrastructures are often turned into non-publics and hidden collectives. Furthermore, the exposure to related forms of state violence, migrants’ struggles and strategies of dissent are mostly overlooked, also due to the choice of analytical lenses. I critically discuss selected tools of the analytical repertoire of STS for studying contestations, how they instruct us to pay attention to particular forms of issue-articulations and not to others; thus how they are - more or less suitable to study material publics of data practices of migration control. I revisit influential STS accounts to understand how and what issues turn into matters of concern, how and what publics emerge, assemble and consolidate around issues as material issue-publics. While the issue-oriented understanding of political contestation provides relevant insights to understand collectivization and mobilization in favor and against  migrants’ matters, it also leaves analytical gaps to grasp contestation beyond institutionalized channels of political articulation of representative democracies, de jure citizenship and nation state bound understandings of political subjects and publics. Taking the case of the Eurodac database and its foreseeable integration into the interoperability project I discuss the limitations for the composition and issue-articulation of precarious publics inscribed in the design of the database system, the policy processes and settings shaping its evolution. I conclude with a tentative conceptual proposal for paying attention to the asymmetries of power and diverse forms to neglect and contest issues mattering for migrants.

Technology service specialists: the role of commercial visa centres in the Tunisian visa procedure for Europe

Yentl de Lange, University of Amsterdam

Emigration from North Africa to Europe through legalized channels is often neglected in public debate and research, despite growing numbers. As contemporary visa policies have become more selective, Tunisians rendering meeting the selection criteria has become more urgent than ever. This paper draws upon preliminary results of an ethnographic study of visa applications in Tunisia for the Schengen Area. Focusing on unassuming bureaucratic procedures, the study examines how Tunisian visa applicants are encountering Europe’s mobile borders through bureaucracy. Tunisian visa applicants must translate their multifaceted personal, social and financial circumstances into (two dimensional) testimonies that fit the desired category of the eligible migrant. This paper briefly outlines the actors, practices, technologies, objects and spaces involved in the visa application process in Tunisia and then focuses on the role of commercial visa centres in the visa procedure. Through what instruments and (information) technologies do personnel in visa centres translate people’s multidimensional and multi-layered realities into bureaucratic realities? What knowledge is considered informative and what knowledge is discarded? What (binary) categories play an important role in the translation processes of bureaucrats involved with the visa procedure? How and when does the two-dimensional created reality interlope or challenge the multi-dimensional? Through its focus on everyday bureaucratic practices, this paper applies an STS perspective on the bureaucratic dimension of the border, contributing to the scholarship on migration, critical border studies and the anthropology of bureaucracy.

“I spy with my little eye”: Using the NGO Space-Eye as a gateway to engage with the socio-technological Mediterranean border assemblage

Andreas Stoiber, University of Amsterdam

My paper is based on my work with the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and their goal to combine artificial intelligence and satellite images to support civil sea-rescue missions. I aim to use the work of Space-Eye as a gateway to engage with the currently developing socio-technological European border assemblage. I understand assemblage as a relational approach to engage with a web of material and expressive relations between a heterogeneity of elements encompassing humans and non-humans. The paper is subdivided into two parts. The first part aims to investigate some of the expressive relations of the European border assemblage by analysing how the Mediterranean is socio-naturally made into a frontier ripe for exploration and exploitation. The second part aims to investigate the material relations of the European border assemblage by tracing the socio-technological network and infrastructure(s) of Frontex´s Aerial Surveillance Services (FASS) and the EUROSUR system/platform. I want to show how through FASS and EUROSUR the Mediterranean border is volumetrically enacted as a three-dimensional space rather than two-dimensional area. Finally, I exemplify the interrelatedness of both expressive and material relations with the establishing of the Libyan SAR-zone, where a ‘legal fiction’ gained material life.

Keywords: Technology – Borders – Satellites – Artificial Intelligence – Humanitarianism – Mediterranean

Organizers

Nina Amelung, Stephan Scheel.