How to (un)do borders with data
Image credit: Yasmine Boudiaf & LOTI / Better Images of AI / Data Processing / CC-BY 4.0
Security Flows Conference
King's College London
19-20 September 2024
‘How to do things with words’ and ‘how to do words with things’ have been key formulations of how social worlds are enacted and political realities brought into being. These articulations of performativity have also inspired critical research on borders, violence and (in)security in the digital age. The project ‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’ (SECURITY FLOWS) has focused on understanding the political, epistemic and ethical effects of enacting borders as data worlds. This conference invites participants to reflect not just on doing, making, enacting and performing borders with data, but also on undoing, unmaking, disrupting and counter-performing borders with data.
‘How to (un)do borders with data’ approaches the datafication of borders as an assemblage of technologies, people, (non)knowledge and power. An assemblage holds together and keeps apart, it enables proliferation and dispersal. Data borders are both new and old, continuous and discontinuous, digital and analogue, social and technical, working and not working, knowable and unknowable. How do we make sense of these seeming contradictions, frictions and tensions?
The conference aims to bring into conversation research that has focused on the details of how datafied borders work (or do not work) with research that has inquired into the critical possibilities of counter-data, counter-mapping, counter-archiving, counter-power or counter-performativity. The prefix ‘counter’ has a dual meaning: to oppose, to go against as well as to reckon, to compute. This dual etymology invites us to engage with the limits, obfuscations, obscurities, frictions, glitches, mess and non-knowledge produced at and through data borders. It also invites us to reckon with how data activism, data users and data rights are transformed by AI technologies and platform dynamics.
By drawing together theoretical, methodological and ethico-political perspectives on the datafication of border control, we aim to inquire into forms of collective knowledge, power and subjectivity and how these can be fostered and sustained.
If you are interested in attending, please get in touch at securityflows@kcl.ac.uk. Attendance is free, but places are limited.
Programme
DAY 1
19 September 2024
Dockrill Room (K6.07), Strand
9.00 - 9.30 | Arrival and coffee
9.30 - 10.00 | Introduction and conference aims
Claudia Aradau - Borders, Data, Politics
10.00 - 11.30 | Panel 1 | Doing border security markets with data
Annalisa Pelizza - Border Control Between Free Market and Vendor Lock-Ins
Marielle Debos - The Biometric Promise: Technology, Market, and Elections in Africa
Anna Leander - Markets Making Migrants: Sim Cards, Secure Connections, and Commodified Subjectivities
Martin Lemberg-Pedersen - Market-crafting between private and public actors in the EU's border security sector
Chair: Tobias Blanke
11.30 - 13.00 | Panel 2 | (Un)Knowing borders with data
Nora Stel - The Agnopolitics of Refoulement - exploring the transnational politics of un/knowing refugee returns from Lebanon to Syria
Sarah Perret - Violent Ends For Violent Devices? A Bourdieusian analysis of non-knowledge practices in border security design
Leonie Ansems de Vries - Entanglements of Uncertainty: The Affective Relationalities and Epistemic Politics of Migration
Margie Cheesman - Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid
Chair: Emma Mc Cluskey
13.00 - 14.00 | Lunch
14.00 - 15.30 | Panel 3 | Datawork as borderwork: value and labour
Lucrezia Canzutti - Collecting, assembling, ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum
Enrica Rigo - Life-making across borders. A feminist view on mobility, value and social reproduction
Ruben Andersson - Building a 'good border' against extractive frontier economies
Lauren Martin - Cash Flows: Valuing Expertise in the Humanitarian Marketplace
Chair: Sarah Perret
15.30-16.00 | Coffee break
16.00-17.30 | Roundtable | Data borders: frictions, failures and beyond
Ibtehal Hussain, Vicki Squire, Antonella Napolitano, Sara Alsherif
Chair: Claudia Aradau
DAY 2
20 September 2024
Dockrill Room (K6.07), Strand
9.30-10.00 | Arrival and coffee
10.00 - 11.30 | Panel 4 | Counter-data, counter-mapping, counter-archiving
Gavin Sullivan - Reassembling Infrastructural publics through security lists:
material participation techniques for mapping list copatterning
Spyros-Vlad Oikonomou - Data for who, by who, and for what purpose?
Tobias Blanke - Reassembling digital archives—strategies for counter-archiving
Thais Lobo - Researching the Role of (Digital) Data in UK's Asylum Archive
Chair: Lucrezia Canzutti
11.30 - 13.00 | Roundtable | Undoing data borders: counter-performativity and counter-power
Themis Tzimas, Chiara Denaro, Chris Jones, Charlotte Phillips
Chair: Jef Huysmans