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Your Voice Is (Not) Your Passport: Entanglements between Border Security and Voice Recognition

Thu, September 5, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Five, Grand Ballroom E

Abstract

While contemporary migration and border policing have largely been analyzed as documentary, visual, and biometric systems this paper takes sound as crucial sensory register through which migration and borders are regulated, policed, and administered. Analyzing the implementation and use of automated voice recognition in asylum determination processes in Germany, this paper interrogates how migrant voices are turned into data in the process of positioning the voice as a suitable medium of verification that ultimately functions as a technology of border security. Asking how the technological mediation of migrant voices is positioned as a condition for political and legal recognition and translated into legal status, I argue that current discursive framings of migration as crisis in Europe make possible the proliferation of security techniques attempted to regulate what is framed as the racialized threat of autonomous human mobility. Further, I propose that the proliferation of data-driven, algorithmic sound technologies used for border security becomes a source for the innovation of voice recognition technologies more generally. Attending to how this innovation effects a shift in the evidentiary regime of asylum determination is crucial to understand how automation of border control and the voice specifically impact the distribution of rights and recognition and conceptions of the human and legal and political personhood. As such, I contribute to both security and STS scholarship by attending to the economies and practices in which voice recognition is embedded to scrutinize contemporary proliferations of technological capture of voices and their translation into border security.

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