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- Convenors:
-
Perle Møhl
(Independent researcher)
Kristina Grünenberg (Roskilde University and University College of Nursing, Copenhagen)
Laura Huttunen (Tampere University)
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- Discussant:
-
Johan Lindquist
(Stockholm University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D289
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
As companions and counterparts of human movement, artefacts both stay and move, engender, enable or hinder mobility. This panel analyses the various types of technological artefacts that circulate and come to constitute relational nodal points in migration, border control and border circumvention.
Long Abstract:
As companions and counterparts of human movement, artefacts themselves both stay and move, engender, enable or hinder mobility. They are the concrete articulations of policies of border making, they condense memories of the past and ideals of the future, enable communication, invalidate passage, articulate legal procedures and are instruments of control.
Arte-facts are both made and making, created and creative, produced and productive.
The panel takes as point of departure the various types of artefacts that circulate and constitute relational nodal points in migration, border control and border circumvention. Artefacts such as documents, fingerprints, automated border control, surveillance screens, maps, application forms, mobile phones, and body parts for developing new modes of verification, all articulate and set in motion specific social practices and interactions. A fingerprint is both an integral part of a particular finger and a dataset travelling between databases and screens, and through its interpretation it enables or disables passage; an application form for family reunification produces specific interactions, detachments and ties, e.g. between a helping volunteer and a refugee; a moving white dot on a screen in a surveillance room is an index of both a living human being and the presence of an approaching illegal migrant that calls for action.
Using artefacts as a starting-point opens up for an ethnographically rich and explorative approach to studies of global mobility and immobility. We therefore welcome papers that focus on the potency of mundane, seemingly insignificant objects and details that have an impact on the daily activities, processes and prospects of border making and migration.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Employing cue-tips human substance is collected from dispersed "undocumented" refugee families to utilize DNA analysis to verify their entitlement to reunification. This paper examines how such tests are experienced and the opportunities and obstacles they present to refugees' family life.
Paper long abstract:
DNA-tests are performed today by doing mouth swabs with cue-tips made from a polyester material. Using this simple technological tool, human substance is collected to check, among other things, the existence of a biological relationship between parents and children. When such tests involve a refugee and children left behind, they are performed to determine whether the children are entitled to family reunification with the parent. This paper discusses how such DNA tests are experienced by the parties involved, and the varying opportunities and obstacles in relation to family reunification that they are seen to pose. On the basis of ethnographic research with immigration officials, legal aid services and refugees in Denmark as well as NGOs and refugees' family members abroad, it is shown that the bio-genetic verification of kinship, which narrows the field of accepted family relations to the nuclear family unit, is in sharp contrast to the broad notions and practices of family and kinship that prevail among many refugees and their relatives. This difference reflects partly disparate perceptions of family and kinship as, respectively, biologically fixed and socially practiced, partly the divergent interests of, on the one hand, a North European country intent on limiting the inflow of refugees as much as possible and, on the other hand, refugees eager to resettle with relatives in another country.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork among border police in Europe, the paper describes the role of vision, biometric technologies and sensory work in border control, the human·machine interactions at play and the processes of sensory enskillment and selective vision that can see through, beyond and overlook.
Paper long abstract:
Based on fieldwork among border police in two border sites in Europe, the paper describes the role of screens, cameras, vision and visual biometric technologies in border and security control, the human·machine interactions at play, and the processes of enskillment and routinization, involving a highly selective vision that can see through, beyond and overlook.
At the Schengen border at Copenhagen Airport, a border guard surveys travellers moving into the Automated Border Control zone and the screens that display the ongoing algorithmic work of facial recognition and data base consultation. The guard intervenes when the machine can't see or foresee, deploying her own 3D-vision, six senses and predictive imagination. In the mountains between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, border guards and sub-Saharan migrants survey each other, assessing each other's technological savvy and routines to find the right moment to act.
All these actors develop and deploy visual and sensory skills and technologies, transforming the border zone into a crossfire of frictional gazes and lines of sight, direct and mediated vision, haptic encounters and specialised sensory vigilance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the transformation of faces and fingers from body-parts to mobile 'body-artefacts' in biometrics, the social practices and interactions that these transformations enable and engender in a security context, as well as researchers conceptualization of these processes.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation departs in a laboratory, where researchers develop and research different kinds of biometric technologies - digital technologies employed for identification based on the body. Taking fingerprints and faces as examples, on the one hand the presentation focuses on how these body parts travel into the biometric realm. How fingers and faces are transformed from fleshy, live bodies into binary codes through minute, detail oriented and complex practices, and how these technologies and the body parts involved move across and thus compress times and spaces, are mobilized in security settings to establish 'true or false identities' and establish particular types of borders in the process. On the other hand, the presentation focuses on researchers' understanding of themselves as a form of 'body cartographers' who map new body landscapes and continuously work on minimizing the distance between body topographies and maps. What is important for the researchers in this context, is the constant creative tinkering with (new) body-parts and their characteristics, with algorithmic processes of filtering and sorting, with relations to soft-ware programs, 'hard sensors' and user bodies. In this context, the lab is configured as a playground - a site for creative exploration and creation of particular body-artefacts, but also as a site for the production of 'seamless security', which enables or hinders particular types of mobility.
The presentation is based on fieldwork in two biometric laboratories and at security and biometric conferences.