Digital technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous gateways and necessary tools to access crucial aspects of socio-economical life, a process further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The management of human mobility is central area where this transformation is taking place.
This paper explores how migrants understand, experience, and navigate these processes in contemporary European settings. Specifically, the study analyses data collected in multiple sites across Italy in 2023-2024 through interviews with migrants, NGO workers, legal advisors and other border stakeholders. It focuses on post-2015 Italy, whose position at Europe’s Southern border and its role as a key migratory route has made it a place of experimentation for border practices innovation, especially in the aftermath of the 2015 “refugee crisis”. In its complex assemblage of long-established paper-based processes and newer datafied practices, the digitalized bureaucracies of the 21st century frontier has ripple effects on migrants’ lives, their sense of identity and belonging, and processes of integration. Drawing from the fields of STS, data justice, and the biopolitics of biometrics, I seek to expand the theoretical conceptualizations of the migration-technology nexus beyond the existing focus on data protection and surveillance to include migrants’ embodied experiences of the new, dispersed and datafied frontier.
Overlooked by much current scholarship on ever-evolving technology and migration, radio continues to foster community and connection among the Irish diaspora. Broadcasting Ireland’s indigenous Gaelic sports uniquely attracts both domestic and diasporic audiences but this research explores how sports radio shapes belonging for Irish listeners abroad. We found that Irish sporting organisations are deeply embedded in local communities, fostering strong cultural bonds that the diaspora carries overseas and yearns for from their new homes.
Drawing on interviews with Irish based in the UK and USA, alongside a conversation with a renowned sports radio broadcaster, the study reveals that sports radio sustains a vital link to Ireland for many of its listeners. With a lens borrowed from feminist memory studies, we demonstrate the nature of collective memory and nostalgia for communal listening in the past shape current experiences. Although sports radio once offered shared listening experiences, unpacking memories of sports radio, it became clear that listening practices have never been fully inclusive and have drastically changed from communal in the past to more individualised today. Soundscapes were predominantly carried by male Irish voices and listening settings were often recalled with Irish women at the margins as facilitators rather than full participants. Today, communal listening is rare, and respondents expressed nostalgia for radio’s ‘better pasts’—symbolising broader diasporic community loss in a hyper-individualised world. However, through digitalisation and global reach radio increasingly directs belonging towards Ireland and fosters togetherness among the diaspora.
In the contemporary world, migration is being perceived contentiously as an Islamophobic discourse that Islamizes migrants and portrays them as an “Islamophobia-induced migration” (IIM) that has to be contained by more stringent border and immigration laws. Modern boundaries encapsulate more than their geographical expressions; they are knotty structures that shape reality, ideality, and virtual environments. As part of IIM entrepreneurship and colonial ecosystems, the interaction of IIM manifestations of bordering processes intensifies exclusion and prevents mobility. Islamophobic ideas flourish in both physical and algorithmic spaces, which happens in both structural frameworks and public debate, especially on social media platforms. With significant human rights and freedoms ramifications, advanced technical advancements have revolutionized bordering procedures and produced interoperable border infrastructures and ubiquitous border ecosystems. Technology, such as big data and AI, is employed along with activities on international borders to shape migratory routes, increase surveillance, criminalize migrants, and undermine migrant solidarity. In this context, digital media platforms and technology have also proven to be resistance paraphernalia, exposing IIM and social justice movements and creating anti-Islamophobic spaces and hope solidarities. Thus, the author makes a case for the Constitutionalization of border technologies to elude, demand, and finally dilute boundaries in a globalized world where conservative and far-right bigotry threatens to marginalize communities more profoundly. The author examines recent advancements in the nexus of AI surveillance technology in managing international borders and IIM to offer an understanding of the processes and ramifications of constitutionalizing border crossings. To accomplish equitable societies, we must constitutionalize the technology and combat Islamophobia.
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.
This presentation examines how border security practices, media technologies, and geological environments generate reverberations at the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit, a peninsula along the southeastern Baltic Sea coastline. The talk introduces a research-creation project titled Radiant Center, which investigates two interrelated phenomena: the operationalization of the electromagnetic spectrum in border maintenance and the geological agency of an aeolian sandscape that proves recalcitrant to national security objectives. By employing embodied listening methodologies, this work reveals how border technologies become embedded in—and contested by—physical landscapes. The project combines field recordings of two-way radio communications, electromagnetic emissions, and subterranean vibrations with interviews and archival materials to create sonic compositions that amplify media-environment entanglements. Through attention to both on-site surveillance systems and remote border management technologies, Radiant Center demonstrates how media infrastructures and environmental conditions collaborate and collide in ways that destabilize national borders. Revealing how geological formations actively participate in the negotiation of political boundaries, this talk contributes to broader debates about the role of nonhuman actors in technological systems of control.
How can we use creative methodologies in our research, analysis, and dissemination to contest the inhumanity of every day border practices and rehumanise discourse around asylum seekers in the UK? In this presentation, researcher Dr Charlotte Sanders and PhD candidate Sudip Sen present two examples of how they have used storytelling as a creative method towards this end.
Sudip presents one example from his mixed-media anti-racist creative practice to communicate the ways in which racism is reproduced in the media, in this case critiquing the terms of the Rwanda policy debate on phone-in radio. Sudip draws from the Russian formalist concept of ‘ostranenie’ (defamiliarizing the familiar, making strange) using naïve narrators, juxtaposition and misnaming/not naming to affectively engage audiences differently on questions of justice for refugees and racism. He emphasises the media as a commodity and that creative methods are not merely a means to communicate pre-existing research, but form a part of the analysis itself.
Charlotte presents her short animation which uses voice actors to share asylum-seekers’ experiences of food provisioning in UK asylum ‘contingency’ hotels, where the inadequacy of food is causing chronic and acute declines in health. Sanders explores how audio-visual forms like this disrupt the role of researcher as ‘expert’ and the mediator of their interlocutors’ voices and perspectives. As such, creative methods can facilitate the direct and unfiltered communication of those in struggle against border power, and support a decolonial commitment to non-extractive research.
The increasing deportation of Brazilian migrants in recent years reflects the tightening of U.S. immigration policies since the Trump administration, reinforcing both physical and internal mechanisms of migration control. U.S. immigration law defines strict entry and residency conditions, with deportation serving as a key enforcement tool. Many Brazilians attempt to cross the Mexican border under dangerous conditions, while others overstay visas, becoming irregular migrants. Intensified enforcement has led to a surge in deportations, reinforcing the perception of migrants as subjects of border control even beyond territorial limits.
Deportation extends beyond physical removal; it acts as a mechanism of bordering that shapes migrant identities and experiences. The concept of the bordered migrant illustrates how borders are no longer confined to geographical boundaries but are embedded in individuals whose mobility and legal status remain under constant scrutiny. Brazilian migrants, even in urban centres far from territorial borders, face restrictive policies, surveillance, and legal uncertainty. These invisible borders dictate their access to services, employment, and protections, reinforcing systemic exclusion.
Diplomatic agreements between Brazil and the United States attempt to balance sovereignty with human rights. However, mass deportations and expedited removals raise concerns over due process violations and non-compliance with international protection standards. Deportation flights carrying Brazilian nationals highlight the limitations of these agreements, demonstrating how migrants remain at the centre of border enforcement even upon return.
This study examines the political and legal dimensions of Brazilian deportations, focusing on new forms of borders and the bordered migrant, and offering insights into more equitable migration policies.
Colonisation imposed external systems that shaped institutions and knowledge, reinforcing exclusion and suppressing alternatives. European imperialists weaponised migration through genocide, enslavement, and war, constructing racial hierarchies to secure power and wealth (Bashi, 2023; Marx, 1997). Today, border regimes and technologies sustain these colonial functions by controlling racialised mobility through exclusionary policies(Vlase, 2024). Colonial power structures shape technology, significantly influencing migration. For instance, AI-driven systems disproportionately reject Global South applicants, perpetuating racial inequalities (Cruz, 2021).
This research presents three engaging decolonising methodologies to foster equity in migration studies. First, a Decolonial Research Lens requires researchers to unlearn dominant knowledge systems, centring non-Western and migrant perspectives, directly challenging Western academia’s authority (Vlase, 2024). Decolonising technology focuses on the top-down (intellectual liberation) model, which aims to decolonise the mindset of technology designers and seeks to decolonise the technology itself (Ansari, 2019; Hui, 2016).
Second, Decolonising Migration Theory critiques borders as Eurocentric, colonial constructs that control and racialise populations, reinforcing capitalist power. It highlights how colonialism-driven global inequalities shape migration through predictive analytics and algorithmic profiling (Bashi, 2023).
Third, an intersectional framework integrates multifaceted migrant characteristics, countering reductive narratives that isolate migration from broader socio-political contexts. This approach sheds light on the colonial legacies embedded within contemporary bordering practices, deepening our understanding of migrant experiences (Vlase, 2024). In contrast to traditional top-down strategies, bottom-up approaches are migrant-led, community-driven technological initiatives which decolonise technology organically (Cruz, 2021).
Integrating decolonial methodologies with innovative technological approaches, this research repositions migration as central to today’s interconnected world, directly confronting colonial infrastructures.
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.