Paper short abstract:

The paper asks how contemporary data infrastructures for processing migrants and refugees at the border, as well as inside Europe, shape the European order. As such, it aspires to contribute to technology studies on the infrastructural construction of Europe.

Paper long abstract:

The paper asks how contemporary data infrastructures for processing migrants and refugees at the border, as well as inside Europe, shape the European order. As such, it aspires to contribute to technology studies on the infrastructural construction of Europe.

Notably, it introduces data infrastructures for "alterity processing" as a field of inquiry for Science and Technology Studies concerned both with the management of Otherness and with the infrastructural construction of polities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at Hotspots involved in registration and identification (R&I) procedures in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on a study of interoperable data architectures across Europe, it suggests that institutional practices, (meta)data and procedures designed to translate unknown people into European-readable identities co-produce migrant people and polities.