Contemporary migration and border policing increasingly employ digital, automated, and algorithmic technologies to control and manage movement. “Data on the Move” takes the so-called refugee crisis as a point of departure to ask how such smart media infrastructures reorder articulations of personhood, belonging, and recognition by valorizing racial and ethnic identification as means of surveillance and policing.
Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted in Germany and situated at the intersections of media studies, critical migration and border studies, and science and technology studies, I show how data-driven projects that are framed as governmental reforms purportedly meant to fix the perceived crises of migration function to deepen inequalities and enhance border policing.
My project at CAIS will result in an academic monograph of interest to academic audiences and practitioners including migration and asylum lawyers, journalists, NGO workers, activists, policymakers, linguists, and software engineers.