Many humanitarian organisations in Africa are revolutionising their service delivery through new technology. This has become important also in the context of rising migrant numbers.
Although digital tools are useful, I argue that Africa must adopt and use them pragmatically because for migrants, in my opinion, the priority should be improving traditional approaches to managing displaced people, with digital tools adopted only if they add a real value. The digital tools are used in many countries including Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. Biometric data – such as face recognition and fingerprints – is widely used in voucher assistance programmes. One example is the World Food Programme’s Bamba Chakula initiative in Kenya, which provides food and essential services to migrants. In South Africa, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s ReedSafe platform allows migrants to access communications facilities and save electronic copies of their documents. RedSafe incorporates the Protecting Family Links (PFL) service and the Digital Vault. PFL is a free confidential platform linking migrants with their missing relatives. The Digital Vault allows migrants to upload and store important documents such as identity cards, passports and birth certificates in a cloud-type service. The above examples clearly show benefits but there are also dangers in using identity systems that target masses of people. If the risks are ignored, human rights violations and identity theft or digital intrusion will become inevitable. The risks of digital humanitarianism, however, extend beyond identity theft and digital intrusion. For example, governments in border management, counter-terrorism and law enforcement without the affected person’s knowledge can use biometrics collected for humanitarian purposes. Social media is also helpful in displacement contexts but it can also be abused if accountability measures are missing. Misinformation and hate speech are major problems on these platforms in Africa. In South Africa, for example, Operation Dudula, which started as an online campaign against foreigners in 2021, has been used for xenophobic attacks and racial discrimination against migrants. In sum, in my opinion, Africa’s main challenge is to embrace policies that give migrants mobility, access to livelihoods and basic services. Innovative technology will not solve these issues unless there are corresponding policies that safeguard migrants
Dominant narratives on migration perpetuate stereotypes, stigmatize people, and justify restrictive mobility policies. Algorithmic systems have a powerful influence on how these narratives are spread, taken up, reinforced, or resisted. These mechanisms filter and curate information flows in unpredictable ways, as algorithmic processes are largely infrastructural and therefore hidden from the user’s experience. This is particularly impactful to migrants, whose voices and stories are already marginalized as they move from one terrain to another.
This presentation presents preliminary outcomes of a participatory, co-creation project the authors are undertaking with digital content creators to counter dominant narratives. Through immersive interviews followed by co-creation workshops, we iteratively explore with recent immigrant digital content creators in the Netherlands: How do digital content creation navigate identity formation and agency within algorithmically-driven digital media ecosystems? What tactics and tools might be used to resist negative narrative frames and build more complexity into how migrants are portrayed? By building a methodology that is focused on practical and applied techniques that can be used by communities themselves for action-oriented responses, this strategic intervention aims to further the field of mobility justice.
In addition to the methods, framework, and key findings, we also discuss the toolkit we are working on with our collaborating participants to help other recent immigrant content creators critically examine their own content and consider how to playfully generate potential counter narratives.
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.