The Ethics of border control in a digital age

29 Aug 2022, 14:00 → 30 Aug 2022, 18:00 Europe/London

Zoom

Join the Ethics and World Politics Working Group for panels on the ethics of border controls. Join for one or both panels as you wish.

“Borders have guards and guards have guns”, wrote Joseph Carens in a 1987 article inaugurating what is often referred to as the ‘immigration admissions debate’. While many borders today are still manned by gun-wielding border guards, not all borders have human guards and not all guards have guns. Today, a ‘border guard’ is as likely to be an algorithm as a person, biometric data or risk profiling software the ‘weapon’ of control and decision-making, and one’s own home, computer, or smartphone to be the place of encounter with ‘the border’. This workshop seeks to explore a range of ethical challenges raised by the rapid development of, and innovations in, border control in a digital age.

This is an ideal opportunity for scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspective working at the intersection of ethics, digital technology, and border control/immigration, to come together to discuss the ethical challenges posed by border controls in a digital age.

Panel 1

Monday 29 August, 2-6pm (BST)

• Alex Sager (Portland State) - Big Data, Surveillance, and Migration.
• Mitxy Mabel Meneses (Sheffield Hallam) - Researching the Mexico-US Border: a tale of
• dataveillance.
• Marina Kaneti (NUS) - What can AI see? The image of ‘the migrant’ and visual politics in the era of machine learning.
• Stephen Damianos (Oxford) - Skype as Border: digital pushbacks and the violence of international protection on mainland Greece.

Panel 2

Tuesday 30 August, 2-6pm (BST)

• Natasha Saunders (St Andrews) - On the ‘Security Exception’: security, digital border technologies, and the immigration admissions debate.
• Georgiana Turculet (UPF) - Data Feminism and Border Ethics: power, invisibility and indeterminacy.
• Kaelynn Narita (Goldsmiths) - The Streaming Tool: a discriminatory algorithm perpetuating the Digital Hostile Environment.
• Special issue discussion

For more information on the theme of the event you can view the call for papers. Thanks to Natasha Saunders and Alex Sager for their work in organising this event.

Registration will close at 4pm (BST) on Friday 26 August 2022.