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Paper short abstract:

Utilizing the concept of dividuality to explore a Rohingya-run social enterprise that uses blockchain technology to generate quasi-legal identities for stateless subjects, the paper considers the opportunities and limitations of such experiments in enacting "post-Sovereign" spaces and lives.

Paper long abstract:

Since Mauss anthropologists have explored how subjectivity is generated by and tied up in collectivities, with Strathern elaborating ‘dividuality’ to describe the ways that persons are constituted by material objects co-produced with others. Deleuze, however, describes dividuality differently: as the outcome of ‘societies of control’ that atomize subjects beyond the individual, rendering them partible data available for reinscription (in things, in data flows). These versions have rarely been thought together; Appadurai for instance only mobilizes “socialized dividualism” (Strathernian) to preempt “predatory dividuation” (Deleuzian). In contrast, I describe a Rohingya-run social enterprise that uses blockchain technology to generate quasi-legal identities for stateless subjects, identities that seek to enable them to access bank accounts and loans. The intermediation of the Rohingya dividual by its representation on blockchain shows that only through the interpolation of the body by the thing (data) can the former achieve legal personhood; only by engaging the Deleuzian kind of dividuality, in which Rohingya are rendered into code, does the Strathernian kind get invested with the affordances that Rohingya seek: where their lives signify beyond both the Rohingya community and the realm of sovereign exclusion. By proposing an in(dividual) more recognized in its encoded form than its bodily version, such that the ‘virtual’ is the primary substrate on which body and political identity rest, the project inverts liberal presumptions of how bodies relate to the social/political (and by extension to sovereignty), suggesting that bodily intermediation through digital encoding anticipates a more generalized global political subjectivity on the horizon.

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Paper short abstract:

The Undocumented Histories Archive (UHA) is an open-access transnational archive that uses computational technologies of anonymization, such as facial obfuscation and metadata removal, to document immigrant rights struggles while safeguarding activists’ identities.

Paper long abstract:

The Undocumented Histories Archive (UHA) is an open-access transnational archive that uses computational technologies of anonymization, such as facial obfuscation and metadata removal, to document immigrant rights struggles while safeguarding activists’ identities. The UHA’s first collection, Licencias Para Todxs/Licenses for All: Mobility Struggles in Massachusetts (U.S), documents two years of a two-decade-long campaign centered on securing driving rights for illegalized U.S. residents. In this paper I reflect on the UHA as an experiment to disrupt the dominant genealogies of media production, circulation, and preservation that have defined the conditions and framings through which we engage representations of a so-called ‘migrant image.’ The UHA uses computational anonymization to generate anonymized ethnographic artifacts that push back against implicit and explicit practices of inscription, disclosure, and capture to which illegalized people are subjected. I argue that computational anonymization can serve as a political tactic not only for safeguarding illegalized people’s right to opacity but also for practicing ethnographic and representational refusal. Producing a tactical anonymous visibility allows us to address the historical silencing of illegalized people’s extensive political efforts while simultaneously deploying measures to counter their digital and physical surveillance. What are the affordances and limitations of appropriating computational anonymization as an ethnographic methodology?

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Uyghur and Kazakh former-detainees this paper argues that a digitized diagnosis of social “untrustworthiness” functions as a type of social brutality from which recovery is perpetually beyond reach and normalized as an excessive social violence for its own sake.

Paper long abstract:

Questions of digital confinement intersect with broader questions regarding social subtraction and social futures. Taking the digital and ritual narrative spaces of public shame where prior “untrustworthiness” is enacted by criminalized Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Northwest China as its object of analysis, this paper examines the way former Muslim detainees and their families attempt to recover their social life after internment. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 former detainees it examines the liminal post-internment reentry phase when individuals attempt to publicly atone for their prior “terrorist” actions in on-line declarations and ceremonial speeches. It considers how rituals of shame are enacted and at times, refused, by examining how former detainees aspire to denarrativize and reclaim their social roles. Ultimately it shows how the digitized and spectacularized diagnosis of “untrustworthiness” functions as a type of social brutality from which recovery is perpetually beyond reach and normalized as a type excessive social violence for its own sake. It shows that this unthought violence is enacted through ostracization of former detainees. Family fracture often follows as guilt moves through association. In this manner the subtracting process of social death starts from legal and political narratives and rituals and then radiates through the community. By mapping these narratives and their effects, this paper makes a larger intervention in social science literature on systematic humiliation and the strategies and social infrastructures of contemporary state power.

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Paper short abstract:

We aim to lean on the relation between Olympics and surveillance from the Paris 2024 edition’s standpoint. Through retracing the history of surveillance and prevention technologies in France and their swarming (essaimage) in the territory, we analyze their contingency to this event's edition.

Paper long abstract:

Since the attacks of 9/11, in every edition of the Olympic Games, different surveillance technologies have been employed in the name of a "security imperative". In Athens 2004, the C4I (Command, Control, Coordination, Communication, and Integration) surveillance system had generated scandals and polemics, fueled by the memories of the Greek dictatorship. Subsequent editions continued to employ such technologies both to securitize the hosting of the games and to leave host countries a legacy in this regard.

With the imminence of the Paris 2024 Olympics, collectives and associations denounce the "security frenzy" that is emerging: facial recognition cameras, drones, behavioral analysis. These watchwords contrast with the fact that France has always been a pioneer in these technologies, in many cases before China or the United States. Part of my research has thus been dedicated to understanding the distinction between what belongs and what does not belong to the Olympics and whether this distinction has any ontological value.

The present paper seeks in this sense to retrace the emergence of these technologies and to investigate their correlations with the hosting of the Olympics. From their gaining strength with the different attacks that struck France in the 2010s, my objective is to understand how the very preparation for this mega sporting event is accompanied by a discourse of territorial valorization, innovation and competitiveness entailed by the "neoliberalization of the city".