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This paper aims to explore the entanglements of the symbolic and material in migration and citizenship politics. I ask: in what ways do identification and surveillance infrastructures inform shared ways of reasoning about migration and borders, and vice versa?

Paper long abstract

With this paper, I aim to deepen the scholarly engagement with the relationship between materiel arrangements and ways of reasoning in Critical Migration and Border Studies. The influence of the 'material turn' in cultural theory has opened new research perspectives on migration governance. A fundamental assumption here is that the impact of material practices differs from that of discursively shared ideas. This paper aims to explore the entanglements of the symbolic and material in migration and citizenship politics. Media theory proposes that format shapes content in specific ways. I ask: in what ways do identification and surveillance infrastructures inform shared ways of reasoning about migration and borders, and vice versa?

To approach this question, I first theoretically examine the relationships between reasoning and material arrangements by discussing relevant theoretical concepts and their applicability to the context of migration and border research. Second, drawing on the analysis of public discourse and government programmes in Germany in the 1990s, the paper illustrates how ways of reasoning over asylum migration justified and framed the introduction of biometric identification methods. The paper, in turn, aims to explore further empirical sites to study how migration and bordering actors rely on data infrastructures and devices to establish shared ways of reasoning. For this part, I draw on document analysis of grey literature and insights from participant observation at a refugee registration facility in Germany (2021).

Keywords: Material-symbolic perspective, data infrastructures, migration and border regimes, ways of reasoning.

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This talk analyzes how EU datafied migration governance shapes and marginalizes migrant representation. Focusing on the Eurodac reform, it contrasts official discourses with civil society counter-claims and introduces “ecologies of contention” to examine exclusion and emerging self-representation.

Paper long abstract

This talk examines democratic representation from the perspective of marginalized migrants within the European Union’s increasingly securitized and datafied migration governance. In EU policymaking, migrants who are often excluded from formal citizenship face structurally hostile conditions of political representation, particularly when contesting dominant narratives in border and migration control. Drawing on Hayat’s concept of “inclusive representation,” the article analyzes how EU data-driven migration policies configure hegemonic epistemic and political representations of migrants, while provoking counter-representations by civil society actors and migrant groups.

Based on EU legislative documents, institutional reports, and civil society advocacy materials, our talk focuses on the recast of the Eurodac Regulation. In contrasting official policy discourses and interventions by civil society organizations advocating for migrants’ digital and fundamental rights, we introduce the concept of “ecologies of contention” to capture how asymmetric regimes of authority, shaped by technocratic expertise, digital infrastructures, and securitized governance, privilege certain representative claims while marginalizing others. Our talk first traces how “the migrant” is constructed and which forms of expertise and representation are recognized or excluded in the process of policy making. Second, we identify both structural forms of marginalization and emerging practices of self-representation. The article concludes by reflecting on reformist and more radical responses to democratic exclusion, interrogating the boundaries of representative democracy that sustain exclusionary regimes of belonging.

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The implementation and use of AI combined with biometric technologies by the Swedish Police is analyzed from the theoretical viewpoint of biopolitics and securitization. How are these technologies understood by different actors and used to nudge and control people in their everyday spaces and lives?

Paper long abstract

New legislation keeps being proposed and implemented giving the police more freedom to use AI technology in the name of fighting "gang crime". The AI Act limits some uses of AI. However, regarding police use the legislation in the finalized act was watered down and the possibilities are still significant. Quite soon national legislation might be in place which would enable the Swedish Police to use AI and biometrics, such as facial recognition, in real time to catch suspects but also to predict crime. As has been well documented AI keeps being biased against certain people and bodies, mainly in relation to race/ethnicity and gender but also age and other categories. These categories are classified in AI systems, either implicitly or explicitly, and one of the aims of this project is to investigate how this is done, with what data, and using which hardware. Another aim is to research how knowledge is being conveyed, or "translated", between different departments and professions within the police. From lawyers to investigators, forensic engineers to street cops, everyone deals with these technologies from different perspectives and with different insights and ideas about what it means. Following AnneMarie Mol's praxiographic approach, this means how it is used in some areas does not necessarily correspond to others, meaning we might be dealing with a multiple object. Lastly, the aim is also to research how these surveillance technologies affect, if they do, civil society and in particular so-called "vulnerable areas" where minorities are overrepresented.

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The paper explores the effects of the increased digitalization of EU air border control, focusing on the introduction of new technologies such as the EES, ETIAS, and DTC at Schiphol and Frankfurt airports and shedding light on how these impact the balance between speed vs. security.

Paper long abstract

Much literature on EU border control focuses on irregularized migration at the external sea and land borders. However, irregularized migration at the sea and land borders only accounts for a fraction of the total number of border crossings annually, most of which are categorized as ‘regular’ and take place at the air borders. The disproportionate focus on irregularized migration at the sea and land borders is thus puzzling considering the limited scope of this form of mobility at these border sites. This paper shifts the focus from the politicized and mediatized issue of irregularized migration at the EU’s sea and land borders to this neglected area of research.

Focusing on two of Europe’s busiest airports for extra-EU arrivals, Schiphol (Amsterdam) and Frankfurt, and drawing on interviews with actors across the ‘travel ecosystem’ (including ICAO and IATA officials; DG Home, Frontex, FRA, and eu-LISA officials; along with tech providers, carriers, airport authorities, data protection authorities, and border guards), the paper aims to shed light on how new technologies such as the Entry-Exit system (EES), the European Travel Authorisation and Information System (ETIAS), and the Digital Travel Credential (DTC) impact how border controls are carried out and the filtering between ostensibly risky vs. bona fide travelers. Advancing the notion of ‘banal securitization’, the paper explores how these emerging tools drive the normalization of banal securitization in EU border control, partly blurring the distinction between regular travelers and 'irregular' ones as increasingly more people come under strict security controls.

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Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork on digital ID systems conducted in Estonia, Germany, Indonesia, Malawi and Sierra Leone, this co-authored paper develops a framework for studying the doing, undoing and redoing of official identities through data practices.

Paper long abstract

Statist registration and identification regimes play a key role in the material enactment of citizenship as a legal status and a form of (national) belonging as they facilitate the production of official identities. This paper combines insights from critical data and citizenship studies with STS-inspired works on the un/doing of differences to study how official identities are done, undone and redone in practice. This is particularly relevant as we currently witness significant changes in statist identification regimes due to a move from paper-based to digital means of identification. The doing of official identities refers to the enactment of official identities through sociotechnical data practices like defining, registering, fingerprinting etc. which feature inscription devices like biometric registration kits or mobile phone apps. These inscription devices are elements of data assemblages featuring specific regimes of proof. Re-doing comprises three different logics: (1) modification of existing identity records (for example in change of name procedures); (2) the re-doing of existing official identities through new identification technologies (for example the replacement of traditional ID-cards through a digital copy stored in a wallet); or (3) the subversion of official identity records through practices usually criminalized as ‘identity fraud’. Undoing refers either to the unmaking of existing official identities or to the non-doing of identities through the non- or mistranslation of identity claims. Drawing on fieldwork on digital ID systems in Estonia, Germany, Indonesia, Malawi and Sierra Leone, the paper develops a framework for studying this important dimension of material citizenship politics.

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I examine the active remediation of image and text by foregrounding intensification of communication. I claim intensity of communication is as relevant for understanding how digital aesthetic media contributes to the formation of online communities and for advancing our theorisation of netizenship.

Paper long abstract

Focusing on ‘key moments’ of high production (density) where media objects spread across platforms (diffusion) and touch on different affective registers, spatial analyses from digital citizenship scholarship have already studied how the performative principles of online humour and memetic practices (Udupa, 2019) are used to negotiate civic belonging and to enact ‘incongruities as existing in and between states-discourse and practice’ (Guldberg, 2024). By foregrounding ‘diffusion’, however, what is missed is how those objects, and the linked claims to civic belonging, are constantly (re)negotiated already before picking up in use.

Building on this research, following Isin’s theorisation of acts of citizens, I examine the circulation and active remediation of image and text by foregrounding the intensification of communication that precedes those high moments. I claim that intensity of communication is as relevant for understanding how digital aesthetic media contributes to the formation of online communities and for advancing our theorisation of ‘netizenship’. The article takes as its empirical space online uses of Latin on 4Chan and Reddit. Turning to a ‘dead language’ with no clear link to a (national) community, I find attempts to institute such community and the civic obligations that come with it (i.e., ‘four rules for Latin citizen’). Foregrounding these ‘unserious acts’, I argue their enactment instantiates constituents of citizenship: the contestations of the ‘unserious’ material shows how intensification of communication at the point of production is ‘seriously serious’, and that the negotiation of civic belonging behind that work is missed if we only focus the output’s diffusion.

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This paper explores the question of "How can states resist transnational disinformation campaigns?" through the case of Taiwan's g0v civic tech community.

Paper long abstract

How can states resist transnational disinformation campaigns? Analyses in the field of International Relations (IR) have offered a variety of explanations which index the harms of disinformation to state power, yet state resistance to disinformation remains underexplored and under-theorised.

Through the concept of a ‘mobilisation of resistance’ and based insights from Social Theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS), I posit a social-processual framework to explain whole-of-society resistance to transnational disinformation and the role of sociotechnical systems in facilitating this resistance. This approach emphasises the agency of civil society actors and sociotechnical systems in articulating resistance to transnational disinformation alongside the state. I specify four mechanisms through which a mobilisation of resistance to disinformation can be expressed through technology: enframing, co-production, legitimation and humour.

As a country at the forefront of combatting disinformation from China, Taiwan presents a valuable empirical site through which resistance to transnational disinformation can be understood. Taking Taiwan’s open-source governance (OSG) and algorithmic co-governance (ACG) as paradigmatic cases of whole-of-society sociotechnical resistance, Thornton seeks to illustrate how these four processes have been materially enacted to resist Chinese disinformation campaigns on the one hand while promoting a democratic social order in Taiwan on the other hand.

I am aiming to develop this into a book project for publication in a university press. Key words= whole-of-society resistance, resistance, disinformation, hybrid interference, Science and Technology Studies, open source governance

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In the midst of uncertainty and instability, how to educate new generations of citizens has become an increasingly contested question. This piece asks how social actors problematize subject formation in technological societies and how they respond through alternative modes of education.

Paper long abstract

This piece focuses on how social actors—parents, educators, policymakers, and technologists—come together around the educational philosophies and practices of Rudolf Steiner in efforts to make the social and technological conditions of subject formation through conventional forms of schooling into a concern worthy of public attention. It is an early version of one of my dissertation chapters which traces how people committed to Steiner’s pedagogy in Switzerland responded to the advent of the internet in the 1990s, the widespread use of mobile phones in the 2000s, the introduction of smartphones in the 2010s, and to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence in the 2020s, and characterizes how these responses reconfigure subjectivity and relationality.

This piece contributes to this panel discussion by attending to the everyday practices of forming citizens through education in technological societies. It engages a leading edge of scholarship in STS which builds upon and extends the Latourian notion of constitution (Latour [1991] 1993) and bioconstitutionalism (Jasanoff 2003, 2011) to characterize constitutions of the human with science and technology (Sunder Rajan 2011; Laurent 2017, 2024, 2025; Boenig-Liptsin 2024; Boenig-Liptsin and West Bassoff forthcoming). While many scholars have focused on how technological artifacts enter the classroom (Cain 2021; Watters 2021; Flury and Geiss 2023; Trumbore 2025), my project approaches technology as social relations (Haraway 1997)—as sets of techniques, practices, and epistemologies that are constitutive of ways of life (Latour 1987)—to trace shifting meanings of citizenship with ethnographic and historical sources and with theories and methods from social constructionism and phenomenology.

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Digital ID systems promise to formalize state-citizen relations through computerized and standardized identification. Research in four countries shows that informal practices remain essential to digital ID operations. In so doing, revealing everyday material politics of citizenship.

Paper long abstract

Modern state rule relies on formalization: it renders society and nature legible through bureaucratic abstraction and impersonal procedures (Scott 1998; Weber 1968). Today, digital identity systems further formalize state-citizen relations through the utilization of computerized, standardized, and sometimes automated identification processes. Such systems are designed to minimize human discretions and tampering from influencing formal identification practices, processes, and decisions. Our ethnographic research on digital ID implementation in four countries, however, illustrates that informal practices are indispensable in the operation of digital ID infrastructures. This findings align with tradition that suggests the deep imbrication between informality and formal orders (Koster and Smart 2019; Scott 1998; Hart 1985). Informal practices that we are highlighting particularly emerge “in spite of” (Polese 2023; Polese et al. 2018) the state’s formalization project. These practices include peer-based digital mentorship in Estonia, electronic ID card street-side repair in Indonesia, frontline discretion as survival strategy in Malawi, and documentary brokerage in Sierra Leone.

We argue that examining the nesting of informal practices in digital ID infrastructures designed to further formalize state-citizen relations offers a productive entry point for analyzing material citizenship politics among de jure citizens. Here, citizenship politics does not manifest in ruptural pursuit for visibility or right-based contestations, but around pragmatic enactments of citizenship through everyday engagement with documents, devices, tools, and other humans.