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Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, we will discuss the development of biometric technologies and their entanglements with migration, identity, subjectivity, policies and social relations, and sketch out modes of addressing these entanglements anthropologically and through digital collaboration.

Paper long abstract:

As global migration continues to rise, large investments are being made in the development of biometric security measures and border control techniques, in order to track the movements of migrants and refugees, and register or verify their identities. Biometric technologies produce representations of bodily properties defined as specific to particular individuals, e.g. fingerprints, iris patterns, retina shapes, voice patterns, facial shapes, DNA, etc. Borders crystallize or dissolve as these technologies are connected to particular bodies, which either match or do not match existing digitally coded body images, and thus provide or prevent passage across borderlines. Biometric technologies then seem to fixate and stabilize the borders premised upon the idea that 'bodies do not lie' (Aas Franko 2006). In this context technology developers and stakeholders often portray biometric technologies as objective and incontestable, thus overlooking the specific societal contexts of their production and the ambiguity and uncertainty attached to their use. Biometric verification of identities in border control, however, depends on substantial human interpretation, social connections, politics, enskilment, and migrants and migration brokers may furthermore become biometric specialists in their own right, developing techniques to circumvent biometric technologies.

In this presentation we discuss how we as anthropologists can address these issues theoretically and ethnographically, and what a collaborative perspective might add to such anthropological explorations.