Enacting migration through data practices

Abstract

Today, migration features prominently in headlines and political debates. How many people immigrate in a given year and the question of how to regulate migration can decide elections or, as recently demonstrated by the vote for Brexit in the UK, shape the future of the European Union (EU). In the context of this intensifying politicization of migration, though, the knowledge practices that are mobilized to constitute migrations as intelligible, actionable objects of policy-making and related disputes and interventions of government have not yet received much scholarly attention. Such knowledge practices include, for instance, the production of migration statistics, the registration of migrant bodies in biometric databases, the projection of future migration flows or the visualization of migration routes used by illegalized migrants, as in the annual Risk Analysis Reports of the EU border-agency FRONTEX in Figure 1. 1 This inattention is astonishing because, from an epistemic point of view, migration does not exist independently of the concepts, definitions, methods, statistics, visualizations and various other data practices that are mobilized to produce knowledge on migration for the purposes of its 'management'. Commonly understood as movement to and residency in another nation-state from a previous country of residence, migration refers to the decisions, practices and movements of scores of people who move and criss-cross national dividing lines in various ways and for various reasons and time-spans. Hence, migration is not a reality 'out there' to which policy-makers and other stakeholders have direct access. Rather, what is known, negotiated and targeted as migration is mediated by a plethora of data practices, including registering, enumerating, counting and estimating to storing, cleaning, imputing, extrapolating and anticipating. These data practices, while often framed as matters of technocratic expertise, are of course political, sustaining the knowledge regimes that inform and shape migration policies, border regimes and migration management. The contributions to this special issue (SI)

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

“…This paper proposes that SSI should be considered part of a longer genealogy of classification systems that have not merely represented people, but have made or enacted them as governable subjects (Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019;Scott 1998). Identification regimes sustain power geometries, biases and discriminations, and the technologies they rely on should be seen as part of the political struggle to control people's movement (Isin and Ruppert 2019;Madianou 2019a;Scheel 2019).…”

“…Yet, identification and SSI are also often depoliticised by participants and treated as neutral tools of representation. In response to this tension in how SSI is viewed, I advocate a conceptualisation of SSI that accounts for the way in which data practices do not just represent refugee populations but enact them as governable subjects and enable mobility control apparatuses (Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo 2017;Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019).…”

The power of relation-making: insights into the production and operation of digital school performance platforms in the US

“…Such moments also include strategic visualization (see also Scheel et al, 2019) and, thus, the (pre)configuration of users in the mediation of platforms' analytical reasoning. Drucker (2010) conceptualized this entry point to a critical perspective on digital technologies as graphesis, pointing in particular to the graphical forms of data 'staging' (see also Williamson, 2015).…”

An inquiry into the digitisation of border and migration management: performativity, contestation and heterogeneous engineering

“…Inspired by these ideas, we want to invite analyses that explore how the identities of bodies -travellers, migrants, refugees -are performed by digitally mediated control practices. Such practices are essentially 'data practices' (Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019), ie socio-technical practices revolving around the production, analysis and circulation of data. As explained before, these practices are enacted by heterogeneous ensembles of human actors and digital technologies.…”