Migration information infrastructures: power, control and responsibility at a new frontier of migration research

Description

Invited Lunch Talk at the Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies

Abstract:
The nature and production of migration statistics are in flux. Migration data is no longer produced by states and collated by (supra)national agencies. Instead, myriad unofficial data sources and processing collaborations produce migration and mobility data as a by-product of both commercial and governmental processes. Those shifts have implications for international processes of migration assessment and control and for states' domestic policies with respect to migrants. This paper combines migration studies with science and technology studies (STS) literature to take stock of these new data sources' theoretical and empirical implications for migrants and the links between migration and broader social processes. We identify migration information infrastructures: configurations of data assemblages which involve private and public sector actors, where data initially collected for one purpose (billing customers, sharing social information, sensing environmental change) become repurposed as migration statistics. We explore the implications of such migration information infrastructures for migration researchers: what are the entanglements that such infrastructures bring with them, and what do they mean for the ethics and practicalities of doing migration research?

Period	16 Nov 2022
Held at	Universitat Osnabruck, Germany