The Greek-Turkish land border is an increasingly militarised topography, where Greek and
EU bodies authorise and promote the use of cutting edge technology to assist in the management and control of irregular border crossings. Yet, in this space, where loss of life occurs frequently, authorities fail to utilise the surveillance apparatus to account for the circumstances for these events.
Similarly, despite the establishment of border control mechanisms and infrastructure at sea, national and European border control agencies fail to prevent deaths, or even to document their operational procedures and efforts.
This presentation draws from recent fieldwork conducted in a forensic examiner’s office in the north of Greece, juxtaposing findings relevant to border crossers’ deaths, with the lack of information provided on the public domain about such events.
Furthermore, it questions how can such a well-established regime of visibility at land and at sea, go blind when humanitarian assistance is required, for the purposes -of among others- preventing death and injury.
Finally, through international case studies, where the installation of surveillance tools is deemed as beneficial to search and rescue, the research investigates these claims of benevolence, and seeks to problematise prevalent discourses on the matter.
The Republic of Turkey celebrated its 100th anniversary in October 2023. This century-long period also reveals the century-long memory of Türkiye’s territorial borders. Despite many problems such as diplomatic problems, terrorism, water, and territorial disputes over the past decades, Türkiye’s borders have remained stable. However, the first quarter of the 21st century has proven that borders, like many other things, can transform.
Turkey has been hosting 4 million Syrians since 2010. In addition, hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and African countries use Türkiye as a target and transit country. Like most states around the world, Turkey has sought a solution to this problem (!) at its borders and has built a total of 1,160 km of integrated physical border security system on its borders in the last 15 years. The system includes the highest level of technological elements such as lighting, motion and heat sensors, electro-optic towers, thermal cameras, drones, and unmanned aerial vehicles. This technological layer created against migrants at the border is, in a sense, re-bordering territorial borders with a century-old memory. Within the scope of the study, technologically-centered border walls on Türkiye’s borders with Syria, Iran, and Iraq will be discussed and analyzed, including field observations, which will be included in the presentation.
Digital platforms and biometrics are increasingly deployed to support EU processes and practices which aim to regulate mobility. On the one hand, member states, as the end users of these systems, are required to develop and implement complex technologies, including the collection and sharing of biometric data across state authorities(immigration, law enforcement). On the other hand, biometrics shift the focus of control from physical borders to the bodies of migrants and travellers themselves (Rygiel, 2011), who become easily (re)-identifiable, as their biometric identities become entangled with a variety of law enforcement goals.
This article examines aspects of the digitalisation of the asylum procedures in Greece and the evolution and consolidation of hotspot approach, in light of the new EU Pact on Asylum and Migration. Building on policy analysis and fieldwork notes collected between 2022 and 2024, it argues that new technologies are not only preventing people from accessing asylum but a host of other rights, and work in tandem with other racialised and bureaucratic tools to further criminalise asylum seekers.
Objects are not merely functional; they act as signs carrying cultural, personal and emotional meanings. The way space is organized (or disorganized) communicates meaning. This paper critically engages with the scholarship on “home away from home,” interrogating the complexities of homemaking within migration literature. While home is increasingly understood as a dynamic process rather than a fixed position, this study examines how mobile Indian men navigate the tensions between movement and settlement, particularly in the context of occupational relocations. The research foregrounds the role of material culture in shaping and reflecting non-Western masculine identities, exploring how domestic objects mediate emotions, belonging and embodiment in transitory living conditions.
Employing the theoretical lens of “temporal materialities” and “object attachments”, this study draws on thematic analysis of interviews, participant-generated photographs and researcher-generated drawing observations to investigate the evolving relationships between mobile men and their material objects. Findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of home-making among mobile populations, moving beyond simplistic binaries of permanent vs. temporary, masculine vs. feminine, and private vs. public. Through an analysis of object biographies, the paper identifies three key themes—blending tradition and modernity, adaptability and multifunctionality and personal expression through material interactions, that illuminate the affective and embodied dimensions of mobility.
Migration disrupts traditional identity structures, but objects help maintain continuity. By centring the emotional entanglements of homemaking, this study contributes to anthropological discussions on migration, identity and materiality, offering a new perspective on how men construct and maintain a sense of home in motion.
The China- Nepal border, spanning remote Himalayan terrain, has long been a conduit for trade, pilgrimage, and migration. Recently, it has become a heavily monitored zone – what this paper calls the Himalayan Firewall – where physical barriers merge with advanced surveillance technologies, raising concerns over human rights and freedom of movement.
China has intensified border surveillance, employing facial recognition, drones, satellite monitoring, and AI-driven tools to track cross-border movements. These systems disproportionately affect Tibetan refugees, many of whom risk dangerous crossings into Nepal to escape political repression. Digital surveillance, coupled with Nepal’s growing political alignment with China, has drastically reduced successful refugee escapes, leading to forced reparations despite international protections.
Beyond physical borders, surveillance extends into digital spaces, targeting Tibetan communities in Nepal. Cultural and political activities are closely monitored, limiting freedom of expression and assembly. Yet, technology also offers tools for resistance – refugee networks use encrypted apps, GPS mapping, and social media to coordinate crossings and document abuses.
The Himalayan Firewall reflects global trends in border control, where digital surveillance exacerbates inequalities and undermines human rights. This paper calls for transparency, accountability, and adherence to international legal standards to ensure border technologies respect human dignity and freedom.
Keywords: Surveillance, Tibetan Refugees, Human Rights, Sino-Nepalese Border, Digital Governance
Sanctuary cities worldwide often claim to support precaritised migrants residing in their jurisdiction as a reaction against exclusionary national policies. This paper is the first of its kind to analyse how digital technologies hinder the efficacy of sanctuary policies, in a way that may render them obsolete. Drawing on comparative evidence from the UK and Canada, it explores digitally-driven responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by different government levels (local, regional, national) and their impact on migrants rights. Findings reveal that the increasing interoperability among population databases have crucially enhanced the capacity of immigration authorities to access sensitive data collected by local service providers, which can then be used to detect, detain, and deport precaritised migrants. Such practices of hostile data-sharing thus weaken pre-existing sanctuary protections that are based on limited cooperation among local and national officials. Yet, local actors have sometimes deployed fresh counter-strategies, notably building non-interoperable data management infrastructures so as to ensure safer access to basic healthcare services. While prior scholarship has mostly examined the role of digitisation in external bordering processes, this paper adds to the academic debate to the domain of internal borders.
The further embedding of immigration checks into UK public sector institutions have made them key sites of bordering. Information systems for datafication, established to enable the reporting and sharing data between these institutions and the UK Home Office, have become emerging sites for opposition to the UK’s border and immigration regime. In this paper, I will highlight the ways in which ‘everyday borderworkers’ in hospitals and higher education have practiced forms of refusal that have undermined these information systems and made care and education accessible to patients and students. However, such ‘data activism’ and the ‘un/bordering’ it enables is under threat from the expansion of machine learning into state bordering practices and processes or what Louise Amoore has called ‘the deep border’. Just as for some states almost every mundane space is becoming a potential site of bordering, so too computer science appears to be rendering all spaces as ‘feature spaces’. A feature is a set of attributes associated to an example and is generated by the examples the algorithm is exposed to. The algorithm still generates the feature, whether data is withheld or not. It uses the examples that are there. Clustering algorithms, Amoore argues, not only becomes a way for imagining and grouping people, places and even countries but also for inferring the behaviours and attributes of this group. I will argue that the expansion of the deep border into bordering public sector institutions will render current forms of data activism to deborder these institutions obsolete.
This article introduces the notion of kinship surveillance as the unilateral production of knowledge about familial relationships of migrants, undertaken and weaponised by the state to enact border regimes. I ask why and how knowledge about migrants’ kinship relations has been rendered a relevant scale of border control, and how it has historically been enacted through different media technologies. The article’s aim is to expose the historical cultural work that legitimises a technopolitics of weaponisation around kinship: rendering an enunciation of “family” as biological and genetic into a means of enacting border regimes. In particular, the article unpicks how fears of fraud and deception, and fears of being “too slow” and “overwhelmed”, structure the ways kinship gets technologically reduced to information points that can be extracted, stored, surveilled, and used in complicity with border regimes. In doing so, the paper draws on archival material around the introduction of “DNA fingerprinting” by the UK Home Office during the 1980s, as well as on the case of blood group testing of Chinese immigrants employed by the USA in the 1950s. At a moment of rampant digitalisation and automation of evermore clamped-down border regimes, I argue that historicizing the technopolitics of kinship surveillance decentres innovationist hypes around “smart” border technologies and challenges the naturalised epistemic authority and weaponisation of knowing and surveilling migrants’ familial relations.
Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), including the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCII), is an exponentially growing issue. Private online reporting and removal tools, such as the Take It Down service run by the NCMEC, can empower victim-survivors, especially young people, who experience threats of the sharing of their intimate images. By pre-emptively reporting images, users could ideally block them from ever being posted on multiple major online platforms with one report, taking power away from perpetrators of sextortion and protecting against the reuploading of known IBSA content.
These services rely on sharing “perceptual hash values” (like digital fingerprints) of images with online platforms in order to match IBSA content without sharing the images/videos themselves. However, our research shows that generative AI attacks using consumer-grade hardware can be used to approximately reconstruct images from their hash value, known as “hash inversion”. This indicates that the hash values should be treated as carefully as the original images, otherwise vulnerable users’ privacy may be put at risk, for example if perceptual hash values of reported intimate images became public as the result of a data breach.
To mitigate this attack, we propose implementing Private Set Intersection (PSI) as an additional layer of protection, to enhance the security and privacy for users whilst maintaining the functionality required to detect and remove IBSA. We highlight the future potential for private pre-emptive reporting to combat sextortion threats, and the need for user-focused design and greater transparency in IBSA reporting and removal tools.
The Protection of Children Act, 1978 (PCA) is widely considered the definitive piece of legislation with regards to youth sexual image sharing. It states that it is an offence to make, possess or distribute indecent images of anyone under 18 and was designed to respond to cases where adults sexually abused children and filmed or photographed that abuse. As youth sexual image sharing has become increasingly normalised, many have called for the legislation to be changed or updated to prevent the over-criminalisation of young people. Another issue with the PCA is its influence on education policy, promoting the prevention / prohibition approach. I will explore how this prohibition message does not in fact prevent young people being victimised by adults but instead serves to reinforce the threats and control tactics used by groomers who coerce young people to take and share sexual images, therefore the PCA is no longer compatible with children’s rights. I will discuss how the Online Safety Act’s (2023) development of non-consensual image sharing offences may offer an alternative approach. This approach could be used to foreground young people’s consent, whilst also providing opportunities to share details of support services and how to remove images that have been shared to social media and pornography sites (such as takeitdown.ncmec.org), which a straightforward prevention message cannot easily achieve. I will conclude by showing how this approach is more compatible with children’s rights and can challenge rather than reinforce the tactics used by groomers.
There is notably growth in the use of deepfake technology to create fake, yet indistinguishable from real life, sexual images and videos of others without their consent. Though there is an emerging understanding of the impact to which this has on it’s targets, the individuals from which this information comes from is almost entirely those whose facial likeness has been used within the media, with little attention paid to those whose bodies have been used as the canvas. Across 321 participants (Mage = 45.70 years, SD = 15.88; 48.9% female), we explored societal judgements of survivors whose face and/or body likeness had been used to create sexualized videos via a vignette design, which also took into account whether said survivors where sex workers or not. Though perceived criminality did not differ across our conditions, participants allocated more blame and less anticipated impact to the body target, relative to the face target, especially if they were noted in the vignette to be a sex worker. Moreover, when accounting for personality traits, beliefs, and demographics, being male and viewing sex work as ‘a choice’ and/or ‘deviant’ predicted greater victim-blame, lower perceived criminality of deepfaking, and lower anticipated harm, with increased empathy being the only predictor of higher anticipated harm. Results suggest a need to understand the broader impacts of sexualized deepfake abuse for both facial and body targets, and continue to generate public awareness of the impact this form of image-based sexual abuse can have on its survivors.
With a strategy of obtaining deep JWST imaging and following up interesting candidates with NIRSpec spectroscopy, the JADES survey has: broken the highest redshift spectroscopically confirmed record (twice); found possible evidence for the earliest black hole at z~10.6, though other explanations exist; found direct evidence for the stochasticity of star formation in early galaxies with the highest redshift ‘mini-quenched’ galaxy, and much more besides. I will summarise key results from JADES survey focusing on Chemical evolution and abundances of the earliest galaxies.
The astrophysical origins of the heaviest elements via rapid neutron capture remain unresolved, even with exciting recent progress in gravitational wave and astronomical observations. One key barrier to elucidating r-process origins using these new observables are the uncertainties that arise from the unknown properties of the thousands of nuclear species that participate in the r process. Here we consider the role played by nuclear physics uncertainties in our interpretations of r-process observables such as light curves, abundance patterns, and isotopic ratios. We will discuss the prospects for reducing these uncertainties via advances in nuclear theory and experiment and point out potential observables that may rise above current uncertainties.
The merging of two neutron stars can provide the conditions necessary for the production of the heaviest elements in the universe via the rapid neutron capture process (r-process). When this occurs, an abundance of material is produced lying far from nuclear stability, and the decays of these nuclei produce the electromagnetic signal: the kilonova. Modeling these kilonova signals, and indeed the entire merger system, remains subject to uncertainties stemming from both nuclear properties far from stability as well as from incomplete information regarding the evolution of the extreme astrophysical environment in which this occurs.
I will discuss current work aimed at approaching this problem from both an astrophysical perspective with magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the post-merger disk with neutrino transport, as well as from a nuclear perspective with detailed nucleosynthesis studies.
We measure stellar age for APOGEE giants using our Bayesian Machine Learning framework BINGO (Bayesian INference for Galactic archaeOlogy, Ciuca et al. 2024). After de-noising the data, we found a drop in metallicity with an increase in [Mg/Fe] at an early epoch, followed by a rapid chemical enrichment with increasing [Fe/H] and decreasing [Mg/Fe]. Comparing with the Milky Way-like zoom-in cosmological simulation Auriga, we discuss that this could be due to the early epoch of gas-rich merger. We further argue that this could be associated with the last massive merger of our Galaxy, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, and discuss how it impacted the formation of the Galactic thick and thin disks and also the Galactic bar. We will also briefly introduce Japan Astrometry Satellite Mission for INfrared Exploration (JASMINE), which will reveal the Milky Way’s central core structure and its formation history with Gaia-level (~25 uas) astrometry in the NIR Hw-band, (1.0-1.6 um), Galactic centre archaeology survey.
The spectra currently emerging from ground- and space-based facilities are of exceptional resolution and cover a broad range of wavelengths. To meaningfully analyse these spectra, astronomers utilise complex modelling codes to simulate the astrophysical observations. The main inputs to these codes are radiative and collisional atomic data to include energy levels, transition probabilities, collision rates for electron-impact excitation/ionisation, photoionisation and recombination. While some of the data can be obtained experimentally, they are usually of insufficient accuracy or limited to a small number of transitions. The R-Matrix approach is credited as one of the most powerful and reliable tools in calculating these atomic data. Recent and ongoing developments of the relativistic parallel DARC codes have enabled an order of magnitude advance in the accuracy of the atomic structure and subsequent collision calculations that are now feasible for lowly ionised high Z ions.
In 2017 the first gravitational wave from a binary neutron star merger (NSM) was detected and the ejected matter created a bright glow called a Kilonova via r-process nucleosynthesis. Disentangling r-process abundances from the broad spectra of NSM is a challenging task that demands a high degree of rigour in calculations of the ejecta opacity and the atomic calculations that underpin them. Recent publications by the group at QUB report on extensive relativistic atomic structure and electron-impact excitation collision calculations for the species Au I-III, Pt I-III, Sr II, Y II and Te I-III, which were subsequently used in collisional-radiative models to investigate line ratio diagnostics in NSM environments.
Currently, the explanation behind the explosion mechanism of core collapse supernovae is yet to be fully understood. New insight to this phenomena may come through observations of 44Ti cosmic gamma rays; this technique compares the observed flux of cosmic 44Ti gamma rays to that predicted by state-of-the-art models of supernova explosions. In doing so, the mass cut point of the star can be found. However, a road block in this procedure comes from a lack of precision in the nuclear reactions that destroy 44Ti in supernovae, most notably the reactions 44T(alpha,p)47V and 45V(p,gamma)46Cr. Therefore, this study aims to better understand the 45V(p,gamma)46Cr reaction by performing gamma-ray spectroscopy of 46Cr with the aim of identifying proton-unbound resonant states.
The experiment was conducted at the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory, using the GRETINA+FMA setup, where 46Cr was produced via the fusion-evaporation reaction 12C(36Ar,2n). The cross section for producing 46Cr, in this reaction, is estimated to be in the mu b range. Nevertheless, with the power of the GRETINA+FMA setup, we show that it is possible to cleanly identify gamma rays in 46Cr. These include decays from previously unidentified states above the proton-emission threshold, corresponding to resonances in the 45V + p system.
Type-I X-ray bursts are interpreted as thermonuclear explosions in the atmospheres of accreting neutron stars in close binary systems. During these bursts, sufficiently high temperatures are achieved such that “breakout” from the hot CNO cycle occurs. This results in a whole new set of thermonuclear reactions known as the rp process. This process involves a series of rapid proton captures resulting in the synthesis of very proton-rich nuclei up to the Sn – Te (A ∼ 100) mass region. Various sensitivity studies have highlighted the 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reaction as significant in its impact on energy generation along the rp -process path within X-ray bursts, and hence, the resultant light curve and final isotopic burnt ashes composition. In particular, competition between the 59Cu(p,α)56Ni and 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reactions within the NiCu cycle directly determines whether the pathway of nucleosynthesis flows towards higher mass regions. At present, stellar reaction rates for both of these astrophysical processes are based entirely on statistical-model calculations. Recently, however, an indirect study of the nucleus 60Zn has surprisingly shown a plateau in the level-density of states in the region of interest, contrary to the usual expectation of exponential growth with increasing excitation energy. As a result, a statistical-model approach of the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction rate may be insufficient, and it is therefore now essential to explore the properties of excited states in 60Zn that influence the astrophysical 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reaction. Specifically, the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction is expected to be dominated by resonant capture to excited states above the proton-emission threshold in 60Zn, Sp = 5105.0(4) keV, that lie within the Gamow energy window, Ecm ∼ 0.7 – 1.5 MeV. In this work, we aim to utilise the 59Cu(d,n) reaction in inverse kinematics at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) to obtain the first measurement of single-particle properties of resonances in the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction. Specifically, 60Zn ions separated within the S800 spectrometer and identified prompt with respect to γ-rays detected by the GRETINA array will be used to determine the energy and angle-integrated cross sections of key resonance states, while neutrons detected by the LENDA array will be used to constrain the distribution of spin-parity assignments across the relevant excitation energy region of Type-I X-ray burst nucleosynthesis.
The AT2017gfo has added to the growing interest in r-process elements, which are expected to be particularly abundant in the nucleosynthesis trajectories of neutron star mergers. With the choice of elements guided by nuclear physics at particular values of Y_e, our group calculates atomic data catered for modelling of the astrophysical objects without the use of local-thermodynamic-equilbirum using collisional radiative modelling. By enforcing observed luminosities, we are then able to make mass estimates of the candidate ions. This serves particularly as a test of the calculated atomic data and, based on the feasibility of the mass estimate, also the underlying nucleosynthesis theory. This event, as well as the GRB230307A last year sport features consistent with the fine structure lines of Te and W, which are particularly interesting to atomic and nuclear physicists likes – as these species lie at the second and third peaks respectively of the r-process abundance. These features also occur at the late stage collisionally dominated regime of the events, making an optically thin model suitable for their analysis. Collisional radiative modelling, and particularly mass estimation of these species in and out of LTE will be discussed.
Carbon burning is a key step in the evolution of massive stars, Type 1a supernovae and superbursts in x-ray binary systems. Nevertheless, our understanding of this critical fusion reaction is not as complete as might be desirable to fully constrain astrophysical models. This limitation centres of the difficulty in determining the $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C fusion cross section at energies corresponding to the Gamow window for these different scenarios as it relies on extrapolation of direct measurements made at higher energies. Such direct fusion measurements are complicated by the presence of resonances at and below the Coulomb barrier. These resonances have traditionally been associated with the formation of short-lived molecular states based on $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C or similar alpha-conjugate systems. Despite study of these resonances over many years, a comprehensive theoretical model accounting for their existence and structure is presently lacking.
Given the difficulties associated with direct fusion studies of the $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C reaction, indirect studies which can identify potential resonances within the respective Gamow windows are of high value. In this respect, a study of the $^{24}$Mg($alpha$,$alpha$’)$^{24}$Mg reaction has identified several 0$^{+}$ states in $^{24}$Mg, close to the $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C threshold, which predominantly decay to $^{20}$Ne(ground state) + $alpha$ [1]. Not only were these states newly identified but surprisingly they were not observed in previously well-studied $^{20}$Ne($alpha$,$alpha_0$)$^{20}$Ne resonance scattering, potentially suggesting that they have a dominant $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C cluster structure. Given the very low angular momentum associated with sub-barrier fusion, these states, which sit in the Gamow window for massive stars, may play a decisive role in $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C fusion. We present estimates of updated $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C fusion reaction rates based on likely parameters for such resonances [1].
A fascinating aspect of the identification of these potential 0$^+$ cluster states in $^{24}$Mg close to the break-up threshold for $^{12}$C+$^{12}$C and similar channels such as $^{16}$O+$^8$Be is the circumstantial similarity to the situation in $^{12}$C with the Hoyle state at the break-up threshold and the critical role that it plays in in helium burning.