Biometric Data Banks and EU’s Corporeal Borders
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Immigration/Transnationalism
, Cyberinfrastructure
Keywords: datafication, border, immigration, biometric, body, code/body
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28
Authors:
Azadeh Akbari, University of Münster
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Abstract
The European Union has gradually intensified its gathering of biometric data of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers and increasingly makes the resulted data banks available for several immigration-related and Police institutions throughout Europe. Where legal, political, and humanitarian efforts fail, asylum seekers try to distort their bodies as the source of undesirable biometric data. With methods such as burning fingertips or claiming to be an unaccompanied minor, they attempt to escape the algorithm and defy the problematic Dublin Convention. Consequently, the EU uses technologies such as retinal scans or DNA tests to overcome such attempts. The body is marked with borders and carries the tension of identification: every gesture, breathing rhythm, stammering, and sweating could contribute to constructing the wrong “data double” (Haggerty & Ericson: 2016). This paper scrutinises border control’s intensification through bodily practices and the dynamism of bodily resistance against such measures. The research addresses the historical interrelations between surveillance, identification, belonging, and citizenship (Lyon 2010) and highlights the data-based exclusion of unwelcome asylum seekers by forcing their bodies to reveal their deception. The extreme datafication of bodies and the countersurveillance struggle both coerce the material body to disappear so that an agreeable data double can rise.
References:
Haggerty K., Ericson, R. (2000). The surveillant assemblage, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 605-622.
Lyon, David (2010): Identification, surveillance and democracy. In Kevin D. Haggerty, Minas Samatas (Eds.): Surveillance and democracy. Abingdon Oxon England, New York: Routledge, pp. 34–50.
Biometric Data Banks and EU’s Corporeal Borders
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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