The onset of neoliberal policies in late twentieth-century India led to a steep rise in urban migration. Small-scale farmers were displaced by large-scale commercial farming, and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) struggled to compete with big corporate companies. The sudden and intense automation-driven sectors rendered millions jobless and prompted large sections of rural and semi-urban populations to migrate to metropolitan cities in search of daily wage work.
This paper draws on two novels—The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit and Homebound by Puja Changoiwala—both of which offer insights into the lives of migrant urban wage workers. Both authors, who are journalists, have worked closely with the populations they depict. In Dixit’s text, Syeda’s family of traditional handloom weavers lose their livelihood to power looms and migrate to New Delhi. In Changoiwala’s novel, Meher’s family is forced to relocate to the financial capital of Mumbai after their crop yields failed to meet the market overtaken by commercial farming, .
This paper analyses these narratives to explore the human suffering associated with migration. I raise the following questions: How do these characters perceive themselves after losing their traditional skills to the forces of intense technology-driven big capital? How is the migrant’s struggle for livelihood portrayed in the texts? How does social location—specifically, Meher’s identity as a Dalit and Syeda’s as a Muslim—impact their experience of loss of livelihood and migration?
This study investigates how Tamil director Mari Selvaraj’s films adapt cultural memory to contest and reconfigure borders of space, caste, and identity in Tamil Nadu, positioning cinematic adaptation as a decolonial praxis. Analyzing Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and Karnan (2021), the research argues that Selvaraj’s work transcends textual fidelity, employing collaborative storytelling, sensory aesthetics, and non-linear temporality to reclaim Dalit histories suppressed by Brahminical and state narratives. Through a framework synthesizing cultural memory theory, postcolonial phenomenology, and critical caste studies, the paper examines three adaptive strategies: (1) spatial remapping, where villages and campuses are reimagined as sites of Dalit counter-memory; (2) collaborative co-creation with marginalized communities, subverting extractive representation; and (3) affective temporality, using ritual drumming, ancestral echoes, and tactile imagery (soil, laboring bodies) to materialize memory as cyclical and embodied. Close analysis reveals how Selvaraj’s cinema dismantles physical borders (segregated spaces), social hierarchies (caste/gender norms), and psychological confines (internalized trauma), transforming adaptation into a tool of resistance. Methodologically, the study challenges Eurocentric adaptation studies’ privileging of literary sources by centering oral histories and participatory practices. It further bridges Tamil Nadu’s regional specificity with global debates on decolonial media, demonstrating how marginalized communities weaponize cultural memory to redraw belonging. By foregrounding collaboration, sensory form, and nonlinear time, Selvaraj’s work offers a blueprint for reimagining identity in contexts of systemic oppression, asserting cinema’s capacity to forge counter-cartographies of resistance. The research contributes a framework to analyze how adaptation, as process rather than product, enables subaltern agency in contested landscapes, urging scholars to expand methodologies beyond textual analysis to include embodied, collective, and insurgent memory practices.
The article looks at the intricate system of power that includes inter alia, physical, internal, and digital borders, which shape the mobility and access to rights of Afghan refugees and migrants in Iran. We find not only new but also innovative technologies which Afghan migrants and brightness makers are engaged in. Topics we will discuss include the contribution of social media networks, encrypted messaging apps, and online advocacy networks as the safe haven for the organization. These channels were found to help the audience in defending their rights, collecting evidence, and overcoming the tight policy environment. For example, the study investigates the channel of migrants using digital infrastructural technology to bolster transnational solidarity even in the face of greater national and technological barriers.
Keywords: Afghan migrants, Iran, digital borders, migration technology, surveillance, resistance.
Iran’s Afghan migration has been the center of discussions concerning racialized surveillance and migration governance and thereby it brings the issue of ethnic and money mowing out through the medium of digital manners. To this end, the article accentuates the significance of chuckling’s network during the times of surveillance and just governance. The usage of the new technology in controlling the movement of caseless migrants is shown to have both an oppressive and liberating effect on them and thus points to the fact that the technology should be a central concern for the empowerment of marginalized migrants.
This article examines the current politics around decolonialism, migration, and borders by exmaining the spatial patterns of Hasidic Jews, a group which practices a similar way of life across various countries. This group exhibits a form of diaspora urbanism in that members are constantly moving between parallel communities across the US, Asia, and Europe. In their radical eschewing of modern society and refusal to integrate into the countries around them, this group has previously been looked at within a decolonial lens as resisting the hegemony of western liberal values. But despite being tangibly impacted by the ability to migrate and often seeing themselves as immigrants, the group’s electoral patterns skew towards right-wing parties which promote illiberal anti-migration and anti-Arab policies. This gets at a contradiction whereby a group that benefits from liberalism’s religious and cultural tolerance — and the ability to move across borders — openly rebels against those particular values as part of an anti-establishment ethos. In this sense, a group which might be seen through a decolonial lens supports larger forces that make their way of life impossible. This paper examines the effectiveness of the decolonial lens towards understanding these contradictions not only for this group but also for the current politics of xenophobia, liberalism, and migration more broadly.
Technology is crucial in enabling diasporic communities to sustain cultural and religious identities beyond territorial boundaries. This study explores how Syriac Orthodox youth utilize social media and digital platforms to maintain their ethno-religious and ethno-cultural heritage, fostering a transnational sense of belonging in a world where digital tools transcend physical borders.
The Syriacs, the first community to collectively adopt Christianity, faced forced migration from their ancestral homeland, Midyat (southeastern Turkey), in the 1990s. This displacement reshaped their ties to their homeland and accelerated their diasporization. While technology is often seen as a force of cultural erosion, this research examines its role in intergenerational transmission. Through digital media analysis and ethnographic research, it investigates how online prayers, language courses, virtual religious gatherings, and diaspora-led forums reinforce Syriac identity. Even without physical return, young Syriacs utilize digital tools to stay connected to their roots, demonstrating that cultural continuity is no longer confined to geographic proximity. By eliminating spatial limitations, digital platforms create spaces where identity is redefined beyond physical constraints. This study employs semi-structured interviews with religious leaders in Midyat and systematic data analysis of digital platforms in North America, Australia, and Europe. It contributes to diasporization and return debates, illustrating how digital engagement reshapes cultural preservation. Highlighting the role of technology in diaspora, identity, and resilience, this research demonstrates how digital platforms empower marginalized communities to safeguard traditions, fostering a sense of belonging that extends beyond traditional spatial boundaries.
Technology is crucial in enabling diasporic communities to sustain cultural and religious identities beyond territorial boundaries. This study explores how Syriac Orthodox youth utilize social media and digital platforms to maintain their ethno-religious and ethno-cultural heritage, fostering a transnational sense of belonging in a world where digital tools transcend physical borders. The Syriacs, the first community to collectively adopt Christianity, faced forced migration from their ancestral homeland, Midyat (southeastern Turkey), in the 1990s. This displacement reshaped their ties to their homeland and accelerated their diasporization. While technology is often seen as a force of cultural erosion, this research examines its role in intergenerational transmission. Through digital media analysis and ethnographic research, it investigates how online prayers, language courses, virtual religious gatherings, and diaspora-led forums reinforce Syriac identity. Even without physical return, young Syriacs utilize digital tools to stay connected to their roots, demonstrating that cultural continuity is no longer confined to geographic proximity. By eliminating spatial limitations, digital platforms create spaces where identity is redefined beyond physical constraints. This study employs semi-structured interviews with religious leaders in Midyat and systematic data analysis of digital platforms in North America, Australia, and Europe. It contributes to diasporization and return debates, illustrating how digital engagement reshapes cultural preservation. Highlighting the role of technology in diaspora, identity, and resilience, this research demonstrates how digital platforms empower marginalized communities to safeguard traditions, fostering a sense of belonging that extends beyond traditional spatial boundaries.
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.