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?