Paper short abstract

Digitization does not stop at the US-Mexican border. The asylum app “CBP One” made it easier to cross the border, but at the same time tightened controls and has led to new burdens for asylum seekers.

Paper long abstract

The US border policy is characterized not only by a discursive and material tightening, but also by an increasing digitization of the border. This contribution examines the CBP One asylum app, which was used by the US government between 2023 and 2025 as a central administrative tool for asylum seekers crossing the border. CBP One has digitized the US border, (once again) outsourced it to Mexico, and at the same time shifted it to smartphones and thus into the hands and everyday lives of asylum seekers. As a result, the border has been blurred once again. With the app, the US government is using “logistical” technology that, on the one hand, facilitates entry, but at the same time also means stricter immigration controls and restricts the right to asylum. Especially for people who do not own a cell phone or whose phones do not meet the technical requirements of the app, a digital wall is added to the physical one. In addition, technical errors, the randomness of appointments at the border, and constant comparison with others not only cause enormous stress, emotions such as frustration and despair among users, but also lead to increasing polarization. Methodologically, I examine the impact of the app on the border, asylum seekers, and their bodies based on an ethnographic analysis of the border regime that I conducted in the summer of 2023 in the two Mexican border towns of Tapachula and Tijuana.

Paper short abstract

This paper uses ethnography to show how digital imaginaries, embedded in knowledge production processes within migration research institutions in Germany, shape migration governance by turning political and moral classifications into seemingly technical forms of expertise.

Paper long abstract

Germany, particularly after 2015, expanded its migration governance through significant investments in research institutions assigned with producing knowledge on policy initiatives. This paper approaches these institutions not only as neutral knowledge producers, but as ethnographic sites where digital infrastructures, political expectations, and moral imaginaries intersect in the everyday production.

Based on ethnographic research in migration oriented research institutes in Germany, the paper follows how scholars, data analysts, and policy advisors work with digital tools such as databases, statistical software and indicators. The process of producing the knowledge; staff meetings, funding applications, reporting practices, and collaborative projects with state agencies reveal how particular imaginaries like ‘refugee’, ‘integration, or ‘governance’ are negotiated and translated into standard digitalized forms. These practices show how digital systems do not simply store or process information, but actively shape what counts as valid knowledge, which questions become researchable and how knowledge production interact with policy-making processes. For instance, some routine practices such as data cleaning, categorization, indicator-building, and visualization become key sites where political and moral distinctions—between inclusion and exclusion, care and control, deservingness and risk—are materially embedded into governance.

At the same time, the paper argues that research institutions are ambivalent spaces within digitalized governance. While they are deeply entangled in state agendas and funding structures, they also contain ethical concerns and epistemic negotiations. Ethnography basically makes these micro-politics of knowledge production visible, showing how digital expertise can both (un)stabilize polarized understandings of migration in contemporary Germany.

Paper short abstract

This study explores how Egyptian YouTube families navigate visibility, morality, and privacy. Through digital ethnography and computational comment analysis, it shows how everyday scenes ignite moral conflict, polarise audiences, and shape new forms of online intimacy.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Egyptian YouTube creators navigate the embodied and emotional tensions that arise from digital visibility in a polarised media environment. Drawing on digital ethnography and computational analysis of large-scale comment datasets, it traces how domestic scenes, religious gestures, and moments of vulnerability operate as “surfaces of the body” through which audiences negotiate morality, authenticity, and social belonging. These intimate visual fragments, for example an eleven-year-old girl who chooses to wear the hijab, displays it on camera, and later removes it, set off intense audience reactions that turn ordinary content into contested sites of judgment.

The analysis shows how digital infrastructures shape and intensify emotional economies. Conservative viewers treat modesty as a moral requirement. Liberal audiences call for openness and self-expression. Commercial incentives push creators toward disclosure. Familial norms call for privacy. These competing demands create affective divides that split comment publics into moral camps that police bodies, question intentions, and claim religious authority.

By tracing how creators respond through selective concealment, careful self-revelation, and strategic silence, the paper demonstrates how digital imaginaries structure embodied relations and redraw boundaries between inside and outside, authenticity and performance, and intimacy and distance. It argues that attention to these ambivalent digital dynamics is essential for understanding how polarisation becomes material in bodies, gestures, emotions, and algorithmically magnified visibility. At the same time, the study identifies small but meaningful moments of empathy and repair that endure within these contested spaces and offer alternative ways of relating in the midst of moral tension.

Paper short abstract

This presentation asks how phenomenological soldierly sensitivity and its associated forms of expertise change due to the use and application of predictive AI. It examines how sensory expertise in military ground operations becomes polarized, calling for new conceptions of targeting practice.

Paper long abstract

Military worlds are currently profoundly shaped by the implementation of predictive AI. Interestingly, the same tools that are used to destroy may, in certain environments, also save lives. As Louise Amoore points out, ‘algorithms designed to save lives, via robot surgery, or to end lives, via robot warfare, share the same arrangements of propositions’ (2020: 58). With the advent of predictive AI, the labor of war has taken a further twist, as decision-making based on AI predictions not only affects but also redefines how sensate regimes (McSorley 2020) are organized and redistributed.

In such contexts, versions of expert sensitivity are rearranged, reformulating affordances that have historically characterized specific regimes aimed at apprehending human bodies for the broader purpose of ‘targeting’. Soldiers engaged in operations are increasingly confronted with sensory adjustments and new kinds of embodiment that raise questions about how expertise ecologies shaped by predictive AI repurpose skills, situated experience, and decision-making processes. As Erik Reichborn-Kiennerud recently notes, “military targeting is about more than the mere act of seeing, taking aim, firing, and destroying a target” (2025: 3). In line with these ideas, my presentation examines how phenomenological soldierly capacities are reconfigured alongside emerging ‘targeting’ possibilities. It asks how sensory expertise within armed forces conducting ground operations becomes polarized, calling for new definitions of targeting practice.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital nostalgia for communism mobilises bodies, emotions, and moral imaginaries online, producing affective polarisation through mediated memories, sensory registers, and claims to authenticity in post-socialist digital spaces.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how digital platforms mediate embodied forms of nostalgia for communism and how these affective practices contribute to moral and emotional polarisation in post-socialist societies. Drawing on digital ethnography of Romanian social media spaces, it analyses how the socialist past is not merely remembered but felt through sensory cues, emotional intensities, and bodily metaphors embedded in platformed interactions.

I argue that digital nostalgia operates as an embodied digital imaginary: memories of labour, food, discipline, and collective life are mobilised through affective registers that blur boundaries between past and present, proximity and distance, connection and alienation. Circulating within platform-specific infrastructures, these practices give rise to polarised affective communities, dividing users into morally charged positions of “those who remember correctly” and “those who do not,” sometimes along generational, political, and experiential lines.

By foregrounding bodies, emotions, and sensory language, the paper shows how digital infrastructures intensify affective attachments while simultaneously producing exclusion. Rather than framing digital nostalgia as either reactionary or emancipatory, the paper conceptualises it as an ambivalent site of (dis-)connection where longing, resentment, empathy, and hostility circulate together.

Paper short abstract

Based on an ethnography with a feminist collective in Greece, this paper examines the embodied, affective labour of administering feminist social media, by focusing on everyday practices of care, emotional engagement, and burnout as administrators navigate polarized post-#MeToo digital environments.

Paper long abstract

What is it like to be the administrator of the Facebook page of a feminist collective? How does it feel to be responsible for disseminating information in digital counter-publics, for responding to private messages from survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) and for generating political feminist content in Greek post-#MeToo social media? Drawing on an ethnography with an intersectional feminist collective in a small city in Northern Greece, I explore the im/material and affective labour involved in administering feminist social media accounts. I focus, first, on the largely invisible forms of digital labour that underpin feminist online presence and examine how it is experienced by the admins as embodied states of information fatigue and burnout. I approach these not as an individual conditions but as a collectively produced public feelings (Cvetkovich 2012). Secondly, I analyze how this labour is informed by the affect-laden imperatives of solidarity and community building, such as feminist chants that circulated widely in social media in the wake of femicides and GBV incidents in the past six years: “We’re full with rage and affection”, “Should you need any help, come to me”. Drawing on Hemmings’ concept of affective solidarity (2012) and Hardt and Negri’s theorization of affective labour (2004), with emphasis on digital feminist labour (Mendes 2021), I argue that feminist social media administration constitutes a key site where digital infrastructures materialize the porous boundaries between connection and exhaustion in today’s polarized world, while revealing key featurs of contemporary feminist political subjectivity in Greece.

Paper short abstract

This paper investigates how depersonalized and standardized procedures afforded by digital and databased infrastructures remain intimately dependent upon embodied, affective and gendered relations of care in Pakistan’s social protection program.

Paper long abstract

Digital and biometric infrastructures are supposed to work by abstracting identities out of immediate socio-political relational contexts to create standardized procedures that can be implemented on a scale. They do so by seeking to turn human subjects into disembodied, data doubles and digital analogs to be processed by, for example, automated inclusion and identity verification systems across various interfaces. However, as studies across multiple contexts demonstrate human bodies can’t be simply rescripted as seamlessly working passwords. Focusing on the everyday politics of digital and databased infrastructures employed by the Pakistani state’s flagship social protection scheme, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP)/Ehsaas Kafalat [Compassionate Guardianship] Programme (EKP) addresses some of the contradictory and affective implications of (dis)embodied digitalities in practice. Arrogating itself the twin goals of poverty reduction and women empowerment BISP/EKP has substantially expanded under various governments: from less than 2 million families as beneficiaries in 2009 to around 9 million households receiving the cash grants today. Much of this expansion is credited to the improved transparency and the relative independence from the personalized relations of traditional political patronage thanks to the inclusion procedures structured by the standardized digitalized and databased infrastructures. Based on extensive ethnographic research in Lahore, however, this paper contends that Programme’s expansion, indeed its everyday functioning at a (depersonalized) scale, remains dependent upon the embodied, intimate, gendered and affective relations of (personalized) care at the critical contact zones where the women beneficiaries meet the state – or those working on its behalf.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on Digital Anthropolgy, this paper explores how Instagram engagement during 'viral temporalities' produces polarized, embodied digitalities. It introduces “distractociality” and “fuzzy-hazy imaginaries” to analyse affective intensity, dis/connection, and algorithmically shaped participation.

Paper long abstract

This conference paper explores how Instagram-mediated engagements during ‘viral temporalities’ produce polarized imaginaries, embodied emotionalities, and forms of dis/connection. Tracing the circulation of viral reels created by content creators, I track how personal interpretations of the object rendered viral become entangled with conspiratorial narratives, affective intensification, and moral positioning. These mediated framings actively shape competing worldviews of what the viral issue 'is meant to be' and generate fragmented imaginaries of a moment framed as collectively significant.

Drawing on digital anthropology, participant observation as an active Instagram user, and open discussions with Instagram users, this paper approaches these dynamics ethnographically through lived, felt, and embodied digital engagement. Scrolling, watching, reacting, and disengaging emerge as affective practices that produce emotional saturation, agitation, and dispersal. In addition to asking how polarised imaginaries emerge, this paper asks why Instagram repeatedly produces affective intensity without sustained relationality. Drawing on concepts such as "affective economies", "embodied digitality", the "ambivalence of the digital", and "algorithmic amplification and affordances", I argue that 'distractociality' arises at the intersection of platform-tempered attention, affective circulation, and embodied polarized participation.

I further introduce the concept of 'fuzzy-hazy imaginaries' to capture the blurred, unstable, and contested understandings that emerge at the intersection of viral content, conspiracy-inflected interpretations, and embodied affective engagements. This paper contributes to discussions of embodied digitalities, affective economies, and polarised imaginaries. It argues that digital infrastructures do not merely mediate collective moments. Nevertheless, they reconfigure how bodies feel, relate, and disconnect in situations otherwise imagined as sites of shared belonging.

Paper short abstract

This talk analyzes the 2025 White House publication of an ASMR video. It poses it as announcing the intensification of fascist, racist and colonial violence in the USA. The talk shows how its political meaning cannot be conceived without taking into account its formal aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

In early February 2025, The White House, probably one of the most powerful institutions on Earth, published an ASMR-style video of deportation. Taking place a month after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as President of the United States, this video was part of a massive communication campaign announcing mass deportations of migrants. Since then, the Trump administration has unleashed thousands of newly-hired ICE agents on communities all over the US territory and claims that nearly 3 million of those “illegal aliens” have left the country, of which almost 700 000 would have been so by force. In this talk, I intend to analyze the ASMR video as a preparation to the 2025 intensification of fascist, racist and colonial violence in the US. To do so, I will rely on online research undertaken in the months after the publication of the video. I have analyzed discourse of people self-identifying as right-wing and as Trump supporters regarding this White House video. I will show that even if that visual material has generated uneasiness amongst far-right supporters, this does not concern the display of suffering. Rather, it has to do with its formal aesthetics. Relying on Walter Benjamin’s thought, I will argue that, by subverting the care economy of ASMR, the video implies a form of digital discursivity that, paradoxically, dehumanizes through excessive visibility. The talk will put forward that is that formal violence that is deemed unacceptable by far-right supporters.

Paper short abstract

Discussing the preliminary findings of a digital ethnographic field research conducted with gamers from Türkiye, this paper analyzes how competitive multiplayer digital games function as fields of subjectification, reshaping social relations through new regimes of the body and affective flows.

Paper long abstract

Historically, games has functioned as a fundamental catalyst for the constitution, transmission, and reinforcement of social relations. As Johan Huizinga (1938) posited, culture does not merely contain play; it arises in and as play. In the contemporary era, digitally mediated play continues this trajectory, serving as a primary site for the production and mediation of sociality. While early digital games facilitated the "softening" of the transition from distant computational machines to everyday domestic tools (Jagoda, 2020), contemporary ludic artifacts do more than encourage technological adoption; they function as sophisticated fields of subjectification and production of social relations. Through networked competition, collaborative teamplay, and participatory fan cultures, digital games enforce a new regime of the body — characterized by high cognitive attention and minimal physical kinesis — while orchestrating affective flows between hardware, software, and the player (Anable, 2018). These systems necessitate and produce novel social configurations, ranging from digital comraderie to the intensification of polarization. Consequently, these dynamics create new forms of interaction that is potentially open to new forms of socialization but often reproduce, reinforce, or exacerbate existing divisions -mostly concerning race, class, gender- found in offline societies. Drawing on preliminary findings from a qualitative study funded by Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, including semi-structured interviews (n=10) with Turkish gamers and participant observation, this paper analyzes how competitive multiplayer digital games facilitate the production and reproduction of digitally mediated social relations.