Processing Alterity. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens and Europe

Speaker

Annalisa Pelizza, University of Bologna and University of Twente

Abstract

Historically, population and territorial information flows have contributed to the formation of the most powerful techno-social assemblage for knowledge handling – the nation-state. How do contemporary data infrastructures for processing non-European populations shape the multi-level European construction? 
This lecture introduces the “Processing Citizenship” project (ERC StG No 714463) in the context of the broader research trajectory which I named “Vectorial Glance” (Pelizza 2016). The project asks how contemporary information infrastructures for processing “the Other” – 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 integration of Europe with a focus on information infrastructures. The lecture introduces data infrastructures for “alterity processing” as a field of inquiry concerned both with the management of Otherness and with the infrastructural construction of polities. Drawing on evidence collected at Hotspots involved in registration and identification (R&I) procedures in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on design documents of data architectures, it suggests that institutional practices, (meta)data and procedures designed to translate unknown people into European-readable identities co-produce migrant people and polities.

Articles: https://processingcitizenship.eu/publications/. In particular: 

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312720983932
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0162243919827927
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0162243915597478

Chair

Katia Pilati, University of Trento

Presenter 

Lorenzo Beltrame, University of Trento

Discussant

Eliana Fattorini, University of Trento