Lecture by Karina Horsti & book launch Doing Digital Migration Studies

Doing Digital Migration Studies presents a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices.

Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments – be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of ‘the migrant’ and ‘the digital’.

The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.

The book launch will consist of an introduction presented by Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi, as well as presentations by the following four contributors. Doing Digital Migration Studies is published Open Access and can be found through this link. Contributions can also be found here.

This chapter traces a cinematic ethics of migration expressed in two digital auto-ethnographies of migration journeys, Midnight Traveler (Hassan Fazili, 2019) and Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020). The two documentaries utilize digital filmmaking tools to create cinematic aesthetic spaces in which the practice of mediating migration is critically interrogated, including the experience of coercive mimeticism as a process of self-objectification and compliance with the European imaginary of the migrant subject.

By providing an analysis of the relation between aesthetics, affect and ethics in Midnight Traveler and Purple Sea, this chapter proposes an understanding of the two documentaries as affording engagement with autonomy of migration and the process of queering “Europeanness".

Bio

Nadica Denić is a PhD Candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her NWO-funded PhD research examines affective and ethical engagement with recent auto-ethnographic documentaries about migration to Europe. She works as a film curator alongside her research, most recently for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

In this chapter, I report on the role of archival participatory filmmaking in migration and border studies to challenge border epistemologies from below. Through the analysis of three workshops held in Ceuta, Madrid and Vitoria-Gasteiz, I provide new perspectives on this methodology as a safe space for undocumented migrants to create self-representational films about their border-related experiences.

I adopt a visual ethnographic approach that emphasizes participation, belonging and everydayness in contexts of exclusion. First, I explore the interplay between participatory filmmaking, migration and border studies. Secondly, I unpack the potential of using archival participatory filmmaking to transform unseen private footage into public films. Finally, I address ethical and methodological considerations and offer recommendations for good practice.

Bio

Irene Gutiérrez Torres is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PhD fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium and University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M), Spain. Her research focuses on migration, film and borderlands through participatory filmmaking. She is part of the research projects Reel Borders ERC Starting Grant #948278 and Institutional Documentary and Amateur Cinema in the Colonial Era (PID2021-123567NB-I00).

This chapter discusses the artistic project Future Wake (2021) by Ahnjili Zhuparris and Tim van Ommeren that examines predictive policing. By shifting the focus from possible future crime offenders to possible future victims of fatal police encounters, using visual and affective means rather than expert knowledge and statistics, the artwork activates critical reflection on the politics and logics of predictive policing systems.

The chapter first situates predictive policing in a context of securitization, and discusses how it enhances structures of discrimination. In the second part, Wevers interviews artist Zhuparris about the aims of Future Wake, discussing the artistic and technical process of creating the project, the politics of data, and the role of art in critical discussion on surveillance and AI.

Bio

Rosa Wevers is Senior Researcher Art & Technology at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands and a PhD candidate in the Graduate Gender Programme of the Department of Media Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. For her NWO-funded PhD research she analyses how contemporary art exhibitions confront visitors with critical perspectives on surveillance and engage them in strategies of resistance.

In 2021, she curated the exhibition Face Value, in collaboration with IMPAKT and the NFF. In addition to her research, Rosa makes a podcast and curates cultural programmes on the intersections of art, technology and society.

Since 2017, German border authorities have used voice biometrics to analyse the accents of undocumented asylum seekers to pinpoint their country of origin and, consequently, determine their eligibility for asylum. This chapter analyses voice biometrics in the framework of sonic weaponization and in the sociotechnical imaginary that supports today’s voice biometric industry, with the aim to direct new critical attention to the auditory realm of top-down governmentality digital practices in the field of digital migration studies.

Finally, I argue how the very sonic nature of voice and its capacity to establish intimacy is datafied and weaponized to construct digital identities and control borders—alienating the value and meaning of voice as a site to affirm one’s subjectivity and political agency.

Bio

Daniel Leix Palumbo is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His NWO-funded PhD research looks at the use of voice biometrics in asylum procedures for processes of identity construction and border control. He is also a musician who composes widely for videos and performances.

Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published widely in the fields of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and postcolonial cinema with a particular focus on postcolonial Europe from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. She is currently the principal investigator of the NWO project Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament (VREM).

Among her publications are: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (SUNY, 2004), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014) and Gender, Globalisation and Violence (Routledge, 2014). She has co-edited volumes such as Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012), Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2023).