Long abstract:

Rohingya refugees find themselves enmeshed in a plurality of migration governance practices involving spaces of calculatory ‘truth-making' through which their bodies become epistemically (un)made, often under the banner of ostensible protection/care. This paper seeks to unveil the neo/technocolonial (Madianou, 2019) rationalities underpinning the emergence of these technologies of objectification, exploring ways in which these genealogies become embodied and contested by Rohingya refugees in their everyday worlds. Drawing on a meta-ethnographic study of Rohingya seeking refuge in the global South, my ongoing fieldwork with resettled Rohingya in the global North, as well as reflection on prior quantitative work with resettled refugees as a public health researcher in the U.S., I examine how residual colonial preoccupations with rendering displaced and othered bodies knowable, legible, and thus governable inform 1) systems of quantifying and monitoring flows of displaced Rohingya bodies through refugee registration and recognition and 2) systems of quantifying and tracing health risk and burden within resettled refugee communities. I consider how entanglements of these datafied practices of governance with hegemonic humanitarian and biomedical discourses on displaced, racialised bodies, still haunted by colonial ‘debris’, paradoxically produce bodies that are both legible/hypervisible (materially, administratively) to some actors and illegible/invisible (socially, epistemically) to others. Finally, I explore ways in which Rohingya refugees are subverting these legacies through the pursuit of their own alternative, datafied systems of identifying, recognising, and tracking members of the diaspora, with the hope of re-imagining a more caring/restorative future for themselves.