Plenary speakers

Irregular migration is by nature hazardous. Most succeed in surviving the treacherous journey and reached their destination, while a few have lost their lives. Still others are stuck in way stations along the migration route, unable to continue but unwilling to give up and return home. In all cases, migrants rely on others like them for support and protection. Camaraderie and mutual aid quickly become key ingredients in social networking. Finding compatriots and making new friends become imperative to strengthen resiliency and manage uncertainties. This study examines the different aspects of solidarity among migrants and how it becomes a collective strategy to manage risks and reduce hazards in irregular migration. The strength in solidarity is inversely related to a migrant’s chances of experiencing abuses during migration. Contrary to the official image of a helpless victim, migrants actively build and draw on this solidarity, switch roles between a smuggler and a smugglee if necessary, to facilitate irregular migration.

In this lecture I will discuss various approaches of engaged scholarship and present how my own understanding of this concept has evolved throughout my academic journey. I will show the importance of critical theory and feminist epistemology in approaching engaged scholarship from a transformative angle. Then I will zoom in further in discussing the ingredients of what I call transformative engaged scholarship which has epistemic justice at its core and meaningful co-creation of various forms of knowledge as its methodology. The aim of such scholarship is to engage with societal actors to co-generate social change towards inclusion on meso and macro levels. I will present some examples from our research within the expertise lab: Refugee Academy at the VU to elaborate further on the importance of such forms of engaged scholarship for academia, society, and refugees.

In her key-note lecture Prof. Tesseltje de Lange analysis current developments in EU Migration Law and policy in respect of so called legal migration. Focusing on migration categorized as for the purpose of work and study, De Lange questions the EU’s transnational friendships. She pushes for a research agenda on the understudied global entanglements of public and private entities involved in these migrations  - from multilevel government to multinational corporations, from IT trainee to plumber - and their contributions to societal change.

In this talk, I bring together empirical explorations of institutions at the margins of the digital welfare state, namely the prison, welfare service centers and public libraries. These institutions emerge as interfaces and backends of the digital welfare state. That means they are often the first and sometimes only entry point for marginalized people with the welfare state. Many people interacting with the digital welfare state through these interfaces are newly arrived migrants, economically and socially marginalized as well as people with a learning disability. These institutions undergird invisibly many of the operations of digitalization as large-scale, societal infrastructure project. Through extensive archival and ethnographic work, I explore the prison, welfare service centers and public libraries as constitutive of the digitalization of the welfare state, which has been a stated goal since the first introduction of computers in public administration in the 1970s.

While often neglected in contemporary debates and future visions of welfare that is powered by digital data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, these institutions constitute important pillars and avenues of the governance reform that is the digital welfare state. Their significance emerges in their role for testbedding (surveillance technologies in prisons), maintaining (welfare service centers promoting digital services) and ‘care work’ (public libraries helping digitally excluded to navigate the digital public administration) digital technologies for welfare provision.

In this talk, I elaborate on the specific character of these spaces, relying on approaches from postcolonial theory, critical design studies as well as science and technology studies, while analytically drawing the contours of the emergent digital welfare state that is currently often presented in relation to the revolutionary potential of algorithmic automation and artificial intelligence, but that was and is grounded in places rarely connected with emergent technologies. Following institutions that are in the margins of yet central to the digital welfare state allows to debunk dominant myths of its efficiency and fairness and reveals that it continues to be based on inequalities and exclusions.