Migrants in the Digital Periphery- New Urban Frontiers of Control

  • Book Session
  • Feminist Book Club
  • Cinema
  • Thursday 22.05 — 16:00 - 17:15

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing. As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In this book, Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity—and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.

Alessandra Calvi

d.pia.lab, LSTS, VUB / ETIS lab UMR 8051, CYU / ENSEA / CNRS - International

Alessandra Calvi is a PhD candidate in the LSTS and in the d.pia.lab at VUB since August 2019 and in the Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes (ETIS) lab at CY Cergy Paris Université (CYU) since September 2021. Her research interests include the relationships between data protection law and technology, gender/discrimination issues, and sustainability. In October 2021, she was entrusted with a research mandate on the EUTOPIA-funded interdisciplinary project 'Enhancing the inclusiveness of smart cities: reinterpreting Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through intersectional gender lenses' between VUB and CYU, under the joint supervision of the legal scholar Prof. Paul De Hert and the computer scientist Prof. Dimitris Kotzinos.