RefugeeDataMinder (https://refugeedataminder.com) is a practice-led research project that responds to longstanding scholarly critiques of misplaced accountability in international refugee protection by proposing a digital archival design where data becomes a site of power that can be contested and reclaimed. The United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) legalises individuals as refugees who would otherwise be categorised as illegal immigrants, in return for multi-billion-dollar annual funding from donor states and the public, funnelling them into its protection and assistance services when national governments delegate their responsibilities under the UN Refugee Convention. In the absence of independent oversight, UNHCR operates within a conflict of interest, acting as both evaluator and subject of evaluation as it transforms individuals registered with the organisation from data subjects into subjects of data through this quantification process.
Visibility and accountability are intimately connected. When rights violations are obscured or unrecorded, the actual gap in refugee protection remains unaccounted for. Visibility concerns not just data absence, but how algorithmic systems structure and privilege narrative possibilities. UNHCR holds significant technical and financial resources to produce curated representations of refugee lives, while scholarly data and grassroots testimonies that document injustice remain siloed, archived but unseen.
The archive draws together these fragmented narratives to surface what has been erased from public view or never recorded, with an architecture of visibility where inconsistencies in UNHCR’s data are a marker of withheld accountability. Designed to evolve through computational and humanities-led methods, the archive explores what else data could do and who else it could serve.