Join us on Thursday, November 5th, from 16-18 hrs (German time) for the first RUSTLab lecture of this winter term. Mitch Pfeifer will present their work on “Before ›Smart‹ Borders”.
This talk outlines a research agenda for historical inquiry into the technopolitics of migration and border control Michelle Pfeifer developed together with Dr. Philipp Seuferling (University of Glasgow). This agenda constitutes an intervention against the notion that ‘smart borders’ are phenomena of an ahistorical present and instead seeks to grapple with the longer and shorter, changing and permanent legacies, hauntings, and genealogies of the current moment of violent border regimes and their articulation through technologies. Pfeifer will illustrate this agenda by drawing on their research into the history of database interoperability, public administration, border control, and policing through the example of the German Central Register of Foreigners (AZR). By tracing how public administration imagined and designed data interoperability between migration and policing institutions, Pfeifer situates these plans as part of larger political concerns about anti-terrorism, labour migration, and European integration that precede claims for ‘smart borders’. In particular, the talk will propose to understand smartness and borders through entangled temporalities of both continuity and discontinuity. Pfeifer brings together border studies and technopolitical analysis by showing how borders are always already historical technopolitical assemblages and how the history of technology must be analysed as structured by evolving regimes of mobility, empire, and racialised hierarchisation of people.
Michelle Pfeifer, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Their research examines the intersections of (digital) media technologies, borders, migration, Queer and Trans Studies, and asks how digital media inform the politics of recognition, belonging, and personhood. Their first monograph, ‘The Sonic Border Regime: Race, Voice, and Technology’, is forthcoming from Duke University Press and probes how algorithmic and sonic media infrastructures have been employed for migration control, border policing, and asylum administration on a planet where global displacement has become a new norm. Currently, they are working on a research project about how demographic, media, and imaginaries are articulated at the intersections of migration, climate, gender, and AI. Michelle regularly gives public talks and collaborates with civil society, cultural, and activist initiatives struggling against state violence.
Location: on campus (MB 4/165) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Sacrificial Intelligence here on our website.