Mobilizing Identities, Digital and Otherwise

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

National digital identity infrastructures have been in the news lately. Whether it is India’s mammoth Aadhaar project, or more modest systems being deployed elsewhere, these recent attempts at building ID infrastructures have forcefully brought age-old questions of national identity and belonging to the digital realm. In our paper/panel, we examine how national digital identity systems in different geographies have attempted to pin down the slippery notion of identity to specific ID artefacts, to what extent they have been successful and with what implications for the owners of the ID artefacts. We explore these questions using our recently concluded and ongoing study of the case of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, non-citizens in Cote d’Ivoire, and domestic migrants and the homeless in India. By focusing on cases where people’s identity as a resident/non-resident, migrant/local, citizen/foreigner fundamentally shapes their everyday lives and ability to earn a livelihood, we hope to deepen the concepts of legibility and governmentality in a digital era (Foucault et al 1991; Scott 1998). While states have long attempted to create legible, manageable populations, we ask how the particular technologies being used in present times have allowed the state to “see” more or differently, and altered a population’s ability to shape what is being seen of it. Our cases also deepen the idea of “infrastructural orphans” by following the plight of those who infrastructures cannot see (Edwards et al 2007) Thus, we contribute to STS’ core interest in the working of human-technological assemblages by focusing on how states and populations learn to use different techniques and technologies to negotiate legibility in the context of newly deployed identity infrastructures across the globe.

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Individual Presentations

• Identifying migrants: The case of digital biometric identity in India - Bidisha Chaudhuri, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore

• Infrastructure and the Power of Elites: Repair as a Hidden Dimension of Inequality - Christopher R. Henke, Colgate University

• Digital Myths, Identities and Moral Economies - Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore; e oreglia

Session Organizer

• Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore