The many lives of border automation: Turbulence, coordination and care

Abstract

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent ‘cycle’ of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.

Drawing Data Together: Inscriptions, Asylum, and Scripts of Security

“…They draw on concepts of (data or information) assemblage and infrastructure to scrutinize practices that do not follow linear logics of technology implementation. In entangling heterogeneous human and nonhuman actants, assemblages account for the mobility and mutability of security knowledge (Frowd 2018, 178); assemblages are characterized by contingency, friction (Glouftsios and Leese 2022), and “a creative muddling through that connects wider forces, spaces, bodies, materials and imaginaries” (Lisle and Bourne 2019, 698). Although infrastructures have been associated with large sociotechnical systems often characterized by “ubiquity, reliability, and especially durability” (Plantin et al 2018, 296), recent literature on border and migration infrastructures has focused on the multiplicity of systems that make up infrastructures and result in a “bricolage” of border activities (Dijstelbloem 2021, 151).…”

Identification as translation: The art of choosing the right spokespersons at the securitized border

“… Valkenburg and Van der Ploeg (2015) , for example, have pointed out how ‘security’ in airport settings emerges as the outcome of shifts, unexpected transformations and late alignments with the socio-material practices in which it comes to matter. Lisle and Bourne (2019) have discussed the contestations of anthropocentrism in the working practices of officers who use automated airport security. Other studies have explored the persistence of gendered and racialized politics in the imagination, design and deployment of security devices (e.g.…”