Seminário do GI Identidades, Culturas, Vulnerabilidades realiza-se na quinta-feira, 6 de Maio, às 11h00. 

O seminário fica a cargo da Nina Amelung, ICS-Universidade de Lisboa.

Título: 

The material politics of migration and border technologies

 Link de acesso ao seminário:

https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/85792531743

Resumo: 

Domestic moral panics and conflicts around migration as well as international border control in the name of anti-crime and terrorism prevention policies have substantially given rise to nowadays’ regimes of sophisticated border control technologies. Migrants are increasingly confronted with such complex border control technologies when they try to cross international borders or apply for asylum in Europe or elsewhere. To better ‘manage’ migration, border control agencies have gradually upgraded their policies and IT infrastructures in recent years. They employ biometric technologies to scan fingerprints and facial images, large-scale databases to identify, register, and document foreign travelers, as well as satellite surveillance systems or drones to detect migrants in distress at sea. Meanwhile, migrants have appropriated digital technologies themselves (such as smartphones and social media platforms), either during their journeys or when claiming their rights for asylum or reparation. The diverse and multiple enactments of technologies turn ‘borders’ into sites of contestation over different and sometimes conflicting policy agendas, policies, measures, interests and migratory mobility - or may immobilize contestation by establishing and manifesting certain dominating understandings of the border. How do border technologies turn specific versions of ‘borders’ into a contested concept, how do they disable and marginalize contestation of hegemonic border control regimes, or open up political articulations about alternative versions of ‘the border’? Relying on a notion of material politics which takes inspiration from work at the intersection of science and technology studies, critical migration and critical border studies I use a range of empirical examples of border technologies and infrastructures to illustrate how political subjects and material objects are co-constituted with technoscience of border technologies and related sociotechnical controversies.

Biografia: 

Nina Amelung is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She works on public controversies and democratic challenges of cross-border biometric data-exchange in the context of crime and migration control infrastructures. She is especially interested in the reflection on emergent or marginalized publics. She has authored and co-authored peer reviewed articles and book chapters on the European asylum policies and biometric technologies applied in migration and crime control infrastructures. Her latest co-authored book is entitled ‘Modes of Bio-Bordering: The Hidden (Dis)integration of Europe’ published with Palgrave MacMillan.