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- Convenors:
-
Carolina Boe
(Aarhus University)
Ulla Berg (Rutgers University)
Darren Byler (Simon Fraser University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), Harty Room
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel engages with the ways in which experiences of confinement and internal border control are re-configured with the increased use of tech by government agencies, and how these are experienced, resisted, and transformed.
Long Abstract:
Over the past decade new breakthroughs in automated technologies have led to a multiplication of modes of containment through technologies such as electronic ankle monitors, facial recognition, iris scan technology and other identification devices that sustain modes of differential exploitation (Jacobsen, 2015; Pallister-Wilkins, 2016; Andersson, 2018; Mezzadra, Neilson, 2019; Aradau, Tazzioli, 2020; Byler and Sanchez Boe 2020; Sanchez Boe & Mainsah 2022; Byler 2022). Ethnic or religious groups, illegalised migrants or criminalized citizens are increasingly kept in situations of protracted captivity, and digital technology incorporated in governance to control and confine them, as well as to extract value and data from them. While most techniques to identify individuals were developed and managed by civil servants up until recently, tech companies today compile unprecedented amounts of data, while rapidly developing increasingly sophisticated software that can process them, with little or no consent or oversight, and with for-profit objectives. The panel aims to contribute to the debate on the larger implications for all citizens concerned by biometric tech that identify and monitor individuals (Zuboff 2019; Benjamin 2020; Jefferson 2020), as confinement and migration control are often laboratories for what is to come for the general population (Noiriel 1991, Breckenridge & Szreter 2012). We welcome research on how digital technologies enforce modes of confinement and turn minorities into source of economic profit and biopolitical value, and on initiatives developed to resist and transform these processes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the use of surveillance technology in a control room at an immigration detention center in Sweden. The paper shows how monitoring of detainees places demands on employees and shapes their inter-employee relation as well as their perception of detainees.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores work in a control room at a Swedish immigration detention center, wherefrom camera surveillance, monitoring of doors and communication between employees is coordinated. I look closely at what the use of technology does for the sociality between employees and how this shapes their experience of the work. I ask what the encounter in the control room does for the sociality between employees when performing their tasks and how this plays out in relation to detainees? I show how the use of surveillance technology brings about a set of concerns that place demands on the inter-employee communication. The argument takes off from Heidegger’s questioning of technology (1977) and suggest that issues arising in connection to the implementation of new technology directs attention towards technology rather than the people subject to it. This has the effect of directing focus away from the consequences of confinement. In the execution of coercive measures, surveillance technology keeps employees busy with the technical on behalf of the social, which has consequences for how detainees are perceived. The paper contributes by adding knowledge of the work in a control room arguing it being part of the transformation of the Swedish immigration detention regime.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the ways in which US detention facilities responded to the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have long-standing “post-pandemic effects” not only for due process and for the rights of detained migrants but also for the overall organization of the US detention landscape.
Paper long abstract:
COVID-19 brought about significant changes to global migration control and confinement practices across the globe. In the United States, the total number of detained non-citizens fell significantly over the course of the pandemic - from close to 50,000 in FY 2019 to around 13,000 at the height of the pandemic to a current 20,146 held in ICE detention in March 2022. At the same time, the number of individuals and families monitored under ICE Alternatives to Detention (ATD) programs are at an all-time historic high two years from the onset of the pandemic. This paper takes the COVID-19 pandemic as a “diagnostic event” to examine how certain digital technologies and infrastructures of confinement became the default solutions for monitoring, surveilling, and managing detained migrants during a public health emergency, often to the great advantage of corporations producing such solutions, but to the detriment of detained migrants, their advocates, and families. The paper draws on collaborative fieldwork conducted on pandemic responses in four detention facilities in the state of New Jersey and the effects of these responses on detained migrants and their communities. Based on this research, I shall argue that the ways in which detention facilities responded to the pandemic have long-standing “post-pandemic effects” not only for due process and for the rights of detained migrants but also for the overall organization of the detention landscape in the United States.
Paper short abstract:
The immigration detention system in Canada is using digital technologies, such as electronic monitoring, for surveilling undocumented migrants in the community. The paper will unveil the impact of these technologies in the life of migrants as a result of data extraction and economic costs.
Paper long abstract:
Canada has used measures to supervise undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers in the community for decades. But in 2018, in order to expand and standardize the community supervision measures, the government implemented the called Alternatives to detention program (ATD). This program includes more traditional tools such as community case management with the use of digital technologies, for instance, voice reporting and electronic monitoring. Although electronic monitoring was planned as a pilot project for a limited geographical area and in-person reporting was initially prioritized over voice reporting, the situation has evolved over time. Furthermore, the perception that these tools are more humane and cost-effective than detention coexists with claims about the economic profits for private companies and also the extraction of data from migrants and asylum seekers without clear oversight. The paper will unveil the ways in which the use of technologies is contributing, but also giving new meanings, to patterns already identified in the Canadian immigration detention system, such as privatization or responsibilisation. Additionally, it is giving new shapes to the inclusionary-exclusionary forms of ‘illegal non-existence’ as a result of data extraction and the economic costs that these technologies may impose on those affected by them.
Paper short abstract:
The paper conceptualizes "digital confinement" through an analysis of so-called "alternatives to detention" in the USA (electronic ankle monitors, voice recognition and facial recognition installed on asylum seekers’ phones) and how they are experienced, embodied, resisted, and transformed.
Paper long abstract:
Facial recognition software SmartLink is increasingly deployed as an “alternative to detention” by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), along with other surveillance technologies such as voice recognition and electronic ankle bracelets. Rather than being “alternatives” to confinement in immigration detention centers, digital technologies have become an addition to detention, spreading confinement into immigrant communities, workplaces and homes and prolonging detention indefinitely.
Taking the specific temporal and spatial experiences of these forms of digital confinement as its object of analysis, the paper conceptualizes "Digital Confinement". It further discusses a collaborative audiovisual project carried out with monitored asylum seekers in Austin, Texas. Through photography and video, the project participants aim to make visible the embodied effects of "digital confinement", or being geo-located and tracked through monitors strapped on their ankle and detained through facial recognition apps installed on their phone, and resist against the uncertainty that characterizes not knowing when such protracted surveillance will end, nor how – with a successful asylum case or deportation.
In addition to the active involvement of private prison companies that profit from both detention and its digital “alternatives”, ICE contracts with increasing numbers of tech companies, which see immigration enforcement as a new market for their products. As they develop new ways of extracting and producing data and value from the mobilities of asylum seekers, tech companies contribute to reconfigure the fields of confinement and internal border control.
Paper short abstract:
The accentuation of the logistical processing of exiles has recently produced a new type of distribution centres for humans seeking asylum in France. Based on a non-human rationality, these camps confine the exiles to extract data from them. Ethnography accounts experience of this dispositive.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2018, France has formed a new layer of camps in its asylum national system : Reception and Assessment of Situations Centres . Their main objective is a rapid, standardised and increasingly automated extraction of personal data to lead to a distribution of asylum seekers on a national territory.
Thus, the objective reflected in their acronym is a reception to proceed with a data extraction of exiles in the manner of logistical distribution centres for non-humans. In practice, we can notice a form of digitisation of exiles in a logic of stocks and flows to be distributed as ‘rationally’ and ‘economically’ as possible. Digitalisation, the implementation of algorithms and the strengthening of information sharing will be highlighted.
Based on a year-long ethnography in one of these camps, a one-off visit to a dozen of them and interviews with exiles hosted there, social workers and state bureaucrats, this paper aims to empirically document and make a case for a European management of asylum that is increasingly turned towards this certainly neo-liberal, but more precisely logistical, practice. Depending on the placement in the panel P029 or P083, particular attention will be paid either to the institutional and material ethnographic data (P029) or to the interviews and observations with social workers and exiles (P083).