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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 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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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.

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Governments increasingly rely on GitHub for digital governance, yet embed sovereignty within a foreign platform. This is a paradox where openness, dependency, and boundary-making are constantly renegotiated within a US-based private infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary governments are increasingly relying on commercial infrastructures like GitHub, a US-based company who host a variety of opensource, public code as repositories in their pursuit of digital governance. Yet, while some initiatives by the platform have sought to enable national sovereignty in new ways e.g. GitHub's EU residency as of 2022, governments also increasingly have to comply with a platform logic that is grounded in the US political system. This paper investigates how governments perform digital governance through an exploration of GitHub's own list of government users, mapping of repositories, participation and deletion. GitHub is treated not merely as a technical repository but as platform, governance mechanism and archive. On one hand, GitHub's infrastructural affordances support both digital governance and citizen participation by making visible code, projects, accountability, and versioning. On the other hand, governments' use of GitHub, as well as GitHub's strategic and differing collaborations with governments, enact a form of boundary-making that shifts the ruling domain towards the glocal standards of the private platform. Infrastructures like GitHub are, of course, not neutral but mediate power through technical architectures (DeNardis & Musiani, 2016). By tracing governments' presence to GitHub and their participation within its infrastructural affordances, this paper argues that contemporary forms of digital governance are enacted through technical dependency that relies on GitHub playing multiple roles.

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Paper short abstract

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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With the instability brought about by information technologies, how to educate new generations of citizens has become an increasingly contested question. This piece asks how citizenship figures in how educators and parents problematize and respond to subject formation in technological societies.

Paper long abstract

My project traces how educators and parents problematize and respond to the ways in which the human subject is shaped through the relationship between education and information technologies. It is interested in how educators and parents attempt to reconfigure subjectivity and relationality by turning to educational philosophies and practices alternative to conventional forms of schooling. Three alternatives are frequently compared by educators and parents in contemporary debates: the philosophies and practices of Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, and Charlotte Mason. Communities of educators and parents committed to these three pedagogies serve as my main interlocutors.

With this piece, I wish to discuss the ways in which citizenship figures as a question in my dissertation. I do so by attending to the everyday practices of citizenship as they materialize through alternative modes of educating children in technological societies. While recent scholarship has 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 the shifting meanings of citizenship as they are lived and experienced by educators and parents in specific times and localities. To do so, my contribution engages a leading edge of scholarship in STS which develops the notion of constitutionalism (Jasanoff 2003, 2011; Sunder Rajan 2011; Laurent 2017, 2024, 2025) and constitutions of the human with science and technology (Boenig-Liptsin 2024; Boenig-Liptsin and West Bassoff forthcoming).