Data on the Move: Voice, Algorithms, and Asylum in Digital Borderlands
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.
Main Research Topics
- Digital Media Studies
- Feminist Science and Technology Studies
- Sound and Visual Studies
- Critical Migration and Border Studies
- Feminist and Queer Theory
Curriculum Vitae
- Postdoctoral Research Associate, Chair of Digital Cultures, University of Technology Dresden
- DataMig Laboratory Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges Of European Migration and Border Control (European Cooperation in Science and Technology COST Action)
- Visiting Scholar, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University Athens, Greece
- Ph.D. Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Publications and Presentations
- Pfeifer, M., & Seuferling, P. (2024, April 18). Smart borders and their critiques are too focused on the tech: Why we need a historical approach to envision different futures. LSE Media Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2024/04/18/smart-borders-and-their-critiques
- Pfeifer, M., & Ward, P. (2024). Flattening the map: How human movement is turned into a logistical problem, the cases of asylum and humanitarian relief. Navigationen, 24(2).
- Pfeifer, M. (2023). “The native ear:” Accented testimonial desire and asylum. In P. Rangan, R. T. Srinivasan, A. Saxena, & P. Sundar (Eds.), Thinking with an accent: Toward a new object, method, and practice (pp. 192–207). University of California Press.
- Pfeifer, M. (2023, June 12). Your voice is (not) your passport. Sounding Out: Racial Bias in Speech AI Series. https://rb.gy/k0p25
- Pfeifer, M. (2021). Intelligent borders? Securitizing smartphones in the European border regime. Culture Machine, 20.