Paper short abstract:

The paper conceptualises code/body to highlight the dyadic relationship between the material body and its datafication. Based on autoethnographic material (Akbari 2024), this paper offers a perspective into entrapment in datafied bodies, where even a beating heart can betray the person at borders.

Paper long abstract:

The European Union has gradually intensified its gathering of biometric data of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and increasingly makes the resulting data banks available for several immigration-related and Police institutions. Where legal, political, and humanitarian efforts fail, asylum seekers, try to distort their bodies as the source of undesirable biometric data. With methods such as burning fingertips or claiming to be an unaccompanied minor, they attempt to escape the algorithm and defy the problematic Dublin Convention. Consequently, the EU uses technologies such as retinal scans or DNA tests to overcome such attempts. This paper scrutinises border control’s intensification through bodily practices and the dynamism of bodily resistance against such measures. The research addresses the historical interrelations between surveillance, identification, belonging, and citizenship (Lyon 2010) and highlights the data-based exclusion of unwelcome asylum seekers by forcing their bodies to reveal their deception. The paper conceptualises code/body to transcend the idea of data double (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) or digital shadow. The code/body (Akbari, 2024) highlights the dyadic relationship between the material body and its datafication. Consequently, the body is not only travelling through borders; it becomes the border. The extreme datafication of bodies, borders, and immigration force the body to become omnipresent, whereas the countersurveillance attempts by refugees and asylum seekers coerce the material body to disappear. Based on autoethnographic material (Akbari 2024), this paper offers a perspective into entrapment in datafied bodies, where every gesture, drop of sweat, and even a beating heart can betray the person at borders.