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Paper short abstract

This contribution examines the European Digital Identity Wallet from the perspective of undocumented migrants. It shows how overlooked documentation practices reveal blind spots in emerging system architectures and assumptions about identity and access.

Paper long abstract

The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) is being developed as a digital identification framework across the European Union. While its architecture is negotiated in regulatory and technical arenas, the everyday lifeworlds of those governed through it remain largely absent from these discussions.

This contribution reflects on the methodological implications of studying such a process from the perspective of groups whose experiences are rarely represented in design arenas. In our research, we focus in particular on undocumented migrant communities. Their documentation practices, legal statuses and digital devise use often do not align with the implicit assumptions embedded in emerging system architectures. Yet these perspectives are seldom known or integrated into development processes.

We argue that this absence is not merely a question of participation but of epistemic orientation. When everyday conditions, documents and constraints of certain populations are insufficiently understood, infrastructures risk stabilising narrow assumptions about identity, access and legitimacy. Attending to such overlooked perspectives therefore becomes a methodological strategy: not to speak on behalf of these groups, but to examine how their situations expose blind spots in infrastructural design.

Our approach combines document analysis, expert interviews, field observation and participatory formats such as make-a-thons. These formats allow us to surface alternative use cases, highlight mismatches between system assumptions and realities, and analyse how some concerns become articulable while others remain difficult to integrate.

By foregrounding perspectives typically peripheral to institutional development arenas, this contribution proposes a way of studying socio-technical innovation that treats epistemic inclusion as central to infrastructural formation.