No dia 4 de fevereiro, Nina Amelung (ICS-ULisboa) será a oradora no Seminário do Grupo de Investigação LIFE. O tema para esta sessão será Contentious Data and Democracy: Challenges of civic actors to make migrant and data issues matter in the EU’s border control regime. A partir das 11h, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.
In my research I investigate how civic action problematizes the increasing datafication of migration control targeting vulnerable migrants in the EU. The political polarization around migration and the unprecedented expansion of datafication are two major threats to democracy, but rarely studied conjointly regarding their impact on contentious politics. Anti-migration policies and hostile environments for claiming rights of vulnerable migrants in EU Member States (MS) have shown the divide between how democracies care for EU citizens and migrants as non-EU-citizens. Datafication refers to turning migrants’ lives into data and extracting information valuable for state authorities’ control purposes, often remaining unclear about the use of migrants’ data and digital technologies. As contentious spaces for civic participation around migrant solidarity are shrinking, democratic values of equality, transparency and accountability are at risk.
Taking the example of the negotiations of the Artifical Intelligence (AI) Act I explore recent attempts of civil society organizations on EU level to democratize datafied migration control addressing marginalized migrants’ data issues and the black-boxed politics of datafication.. I discuss how specific contentious politics emerge from (hostile) ecologies of participation shaped by institutions, political cultures, governance regimes and hegemonic discourse. Thus, this research brings together Sociology of Science and Technology, with Social Movement, Citizenship and Migration Studies and generates novel insights into democratization with a focus on migrants’ data and the continuums of (non)knowledge, (non)citizenship and (non)publics.
Nina Amelung is a sociologist and research fellow at the Institute of Social Science (ICS), Universidade de Lisboa. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Political Sociology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Migration Studies. She explores relations between emergent publics, matters of citizenship and digital and biometric technologies applied in migration and crime control regimes. She is co-chair of the Thematic Section on Knowledge, Science and Technology of the Portuguese Sociological Association (Associação Portuguesa de Sociologia – APS), the independent research network STS-MIGTEC and in the leadership team of the Cost Action DATAMIG.