Digital Border Practices

Abstract

Border practices have been sites of contestations and struggles over who belongs and who doesn’t, who is and is not allowed to move freely in transnational or national spaces. Embedded as they are in the bordering process, policing and security practices produce the irregularity and illegitimacy of the migrating subject. In Europe, policy decisions dictated by executive powers after 9/11 have enabled new national and transnational surveillance, border and migration control technologies to take shape in the name of controlled migration and preventing and reacting to crime and terror. At the same time, bordering practices simultaneously imply processes of dissidence and resistance. Border dissidence and resistance to bordering practices refer to dynamic and complex interactions between migrants and non-human others, technologies in the borderland. Activists configure both hybrid alliances of human and nonhuman others and new virtual and urban spaces in order to resist bordering practices.
We lack studies that relate and juxtapose border technologies to subjects shaped and enacted by these technologies and mobilize the conceptual and methodological repertoire of Science and Technology Studies. The co-construction of border technologies, technologies of border resistance and migration can help us to raise critical questions regarding both border technologies and migration.
This panel aims to understand the role of technology in controlling and enabling migration. We include studies on the use of technology in the acts of imposing official power to control and limit migrations influxes, as well as the use of technology in protesting/circumventing power structures inherent in border technologies.

Individual Presentations

• Migrants’ Digital Resistance Practices in the Greek Territory and Borderland - Vasiliki Markygianni, IT University of Copenhagen; Vasilis Galis

• Migrants’ Digital Practices in Anti-Deportation Strategies and Return Strategies - Martin Bak Jørgensen, University of Aalborg; Leandros Fischer, University of Aalborg

• Materials of Solidarity: On Alternative Infrastructures of Care - Fredy Mora-Gámez, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)

• Hashtag #NSFW #Tumblr: What the Tumblr Ban Means for Platform Migration - Martin Johannes Riedl, The University of Texas at Austin

Session Organizers

• Vasilis Galis

• Martin Bak Jørgensen, University of Aalborg