Periodic Reporting for period 5 - ProcessCitizenship (Processing Citizenship: Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-09-01 do 2023-08-31
How does migration change Europe? This question can be answered legally and politically, as most policy makers, sociologists and journalists do. Or it can be answered technically: how do data infrastructures for migration management shape Europe?
Attempts to manage contemporary mobility are changing not only European policies, but also the way knowledge about individuals, Member States and Europe is produced and shared. Information systems and infrastructures are key enablers of these forms of knowledge. They shape, collect, evaluate and circulate data about people on the move to and across Europe: from asylum seekers to VISA travelers, from migrants to tourists, from travelling residents to refugees. Information infrastructures have a major role in enacting some of these people as regular, and others as “alterity”.
How information infrastructures for the “processing of alterity” work, the categories they use to sort people out, their degree of interoperability and standardization are thus questions that raise technical as well as social, organizational, political and institutional questions. While processing the identity of individuals, such infrastructures also shape the multi-level European order. This has been the main insight of "Processing Citizenship. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe", a six-year research program involving a team of ethnographers, sociologists of technology, software developers and political scientists.
Over these years Processing Citizenship has aimed to develop a “history of the present” that accounts for contemporary material practices of registration and identification of Alterity as activities of long-term governance transformation. The Project has pursued three interrelated objectives.
1) To understand how migrants’ identities are shaped by registration and identification infrastructures and practices, and how migrants adapt or resist them.
2) To understand how institutional relationships (e.g. between Member States and Europe, authorities and contractors, humanitarian actors and international organizations) are shaped by data infrastructures and practices for alterity processing.
3) To understand how modernist conceptualizations of space are challenged by data infrastructures for population management.
Results confirm the hypothesis about the co-production of alterity and European order. On the one hand, data infrastructures and practices make people on the move knowable, but they do not do it neutrally. They often enact them as alterity, as irreducible others - migrants and asylum seekers, and even as security subjects. On the other hand, infrastructures have long-term consequences and transform the epistemic priorities of European reception and asylum actors, the chains of actors involved in migration management and eventually our imaginary of what “Europe” should be.
Attempts to manage contemporary mobility are changing not only European policies, but also the way knowledge about individuals, Member States and Europe is produced and shared. Information systems and infrastructures are key enablers of these forms of knowledge. They shape, collect, evaluate and circulate data about people on the move to and across Europe: from asylum seekers to VISA travelers, from migrants to tourists, from travelling residents to refugees. Information infrastructures have a major role in enacting some of these people as regular, and others as “alterity”.
How information infrastructures for the “processing of alterity” work, the categories they use to sort people out, their degree of interoperability and standardization are thus questions that raise technical as well as social, organizational, political and institutional questions. While processing the identity of individuals, such infrastructures also shape the multi-level European order. This has been the main insight of "Processing Citizenship. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe", a six-year research program involving a team of ethnographers, sociologists of technology, software developers and political scientists.
Over these years Processing Citizenship has aimed to develop a “history of the present” that accounts for contemporary material practices of registration and identification of Alterity as activities of long-term governance transformation. The Project has pursued three interrelated objectives.
1) To understand how migrants’ identities are shaped by registration and identification infrastructures and practices, and how migrants adapt or resist them.
2) To understand how institutional relationships (e.g. between Member States and Europe, authorities and contractors, humanitarian actors and international organizations) are shaped by data infrastructures and practices for alterity processing.
3) To understand how modernist conceptualizations of space are challenged by data infrastructures for population management.
Results confirm the hypothesis about the co-production of alterity and European order. On the one hand, data infrastructures and practices make people on the move knowable, but they do not do it neutrally. They often enact them as alterity, as irreducible others - migrants and asylum seekers, and even as security subjects. On the other hand, infrastructures have long-term consequences and transform the epistemic priorities of European reception and asylum actors, the chains of actors involved in migration management and eventually our imaginary of what “Europe” should be.
Processing Citizenship was launched in March 2017. In the early months the PI created the Project’s operational infrastructure. The initial team kicked-off in September 2017 and until February 2018 it took part in weekly training. Pelizza (2017) set the field for “Alterity Processing” as a conceptual innovation.
Between March 2018 and August 2019 fieldwork on the first research objective was conducted in Italy, Greece and Germany: collection of technical and legal documents, interviews with migrants, IT developers and registration officers, observation of identification and registration (I&R) procedures. Fieldwork in Italy revealed the co-production of alterity and European order along epistemic lines, the competitions between chains of data, metadata and actors, and forms of resistance to registration exerted by people on the move. It brought to the publication of the highly read Pelizza (2020). Fieldwork in Greece concerned the observation of identification and registration practices at hotspots as sociotechnical practices which resulted in the publication of Dijstelbloem and Pelizza (2019), Pelizza and Van Rossem (2021) and Pelizza (2021) on identification as translation. In 2019 new team acquisitions were carried on.
Two PhDs and the PI continued pursuing objective 1 in 2020-2022. Fieldwork was carried on at a company supplying data matching software the Dutch government and EU Commission, and with asylum seekers, social workers and lawyers. One PhD student worked with migrants on temporalities of resistance (Olivieri 2023; Olivieri et al. forthcoming). He developed the game “My Documents, Check Them Out” (https://processingcitizenship.eu/my-documents-check-them-out/). Another PhD student developed the “Ontology Explorer” (OE) (https://processingcitizenship.eu/ontology-explorer ): a method and Java-script tool to compare data schemas (Van Rossem and Pelizza 2022). Script analysis was conducted on “scripts of alterity” devised through the OE (Pelizza and Van Rossem 2023).
Two postdocs and the PI addressed the second objective. Fieldwork was carried on at the Italian Ministry of Interior and at IOM. Pettrachin and Pelizza (forthcoming) mapped data circulation among national and European agencies using social network analysis. Pelizza and Loschi (2023) demonstrated the sociotechnical dynamics though which IOM assumed the role of mediators in health data exchange among member states. The PI co-organized (with Claudia Aradau) a panel at the EASST/4S conference in Prague, which triggered the special issue “Script of Security”. In May 2021 the whole team organized the conference “Digitizing People” (https://eventi.unibo.it/digitizingpeoples/).
In 2022-2023 the third objective was addressed by one postdoc together with the PI. Fieldwork was carried on with Ukrainian refugees in Austria to map incipient citizenship/territory couplings (Trauttmansdorff and Pelizza in preparation). The final conference was held in June 2023 (https://eventi.unibo.it/processingcitizenship).
Between March 2018 and August 2019 fieldwork on the first research objective was conducted in Italy, Greece and Germany: collection of technical and legal documents, interviews with migrants, IT developers and registration officers, observation of identification and registration (I&R) procedures. Fieldwork in Italy revealed the co-production of alterity and European order along epistemic lines, the competitions between chains of data, metadata and actors, and forms of resistance to registration exerted by people on the move. It brought to the publication of the highly read Pelizza (2020). Fieldwork in Greece concerned the observation of identification and registration practices at hotspots as sociotechnical practices which resulted in the publication of Dijstelbloem and Pelizza (2019), Pelizza and Van Rossem (2021) and Pelizza (2021) on identification as translation. In 2019 new team acquisitions were carried on.
Two PhDs and the PI continued pursuing objective 1 in 2020-2022. Fieldwork was carried on at a company supplying data matching software the Dutch government and EU Commission, and with asylum seekers, social workers and lawyers. One PhD student worked with migrants on temporalities of resistance (Olivieri 2023; Olivieri et al. forthcoming). He developed the game “My Documents, Check Them Out” (https://processingcitizenship.eu/my-documents-check-them-out/). Another PhD student developed the “Ontology Explorer” (OE) (https://processingcitizenship.eu/ontology-explorer ): a method and Java-script tool to compare data schemas (Van Rossem and Pelizza 2022). Script analysis was conducted on “scripts of alterity” devised through the OE (Pelizza and Van Rossem 2023).
Two postdocs and the PI addressed the second objective. Fieldwork was carried on at the Italian Ministry of Interior and at IOM. Pettrachin and Pelizza (forthcoming) mapped data circulation among national and European agencies using social network analysis. Pelizza and Loschi (2023) demonstrated the sociotechnical dynamics though which IOM assumed the role of mediators in health data exchange among member states. The PI co-organized (with Claudia Aradau) a panel at the EASST/4S conference in Prague, which triggered the special issue “Script of Security”. In May 2021 the whole team organized the conference “Digitizing People” (https://eventi.unibo.it/digitizingpeoples/).
In 2022-2023 the third objective was addressed by one postdoc together with the PI. Fieldwork was carried on with Ukrainian refugees in Austria to map incipient citizenship/territory couplings (Trauttmansdorff and Pelizza in preparation). The final conference was held in June 2023 (https://eventi.unibo.it/processingcitizenship).
Of the 12 publications initially foreseen, eight were published, two accepted and two are in preparation. On top of the ten already published/accepted, nine initially unforeseen articles in international peer-reviewed journals, four initially unforeseen book chapters, two initially unforeseen commentaries for lay public, and one extra monography were published (i.e. Olivieri’s thesis book), all in Gold Open Access. One unforeseen monography will be published as an outcome of Van Rossem’s PhD thesis. In total, as of today 27 have been published or accepted. On top of these, four unforeseen articles, a Manifesto, and two planned articles will be soon submitted to international peer-reviewed journals, as well as a further monography. These publication outcomes by far exceed the initially foreseen plan of deliverables.
The Project has been successful in shifting the debate on migration management, security and institutional agency towards considering data processing of individual identities from a socio-technical, material and long-term perspective.
Most notably, the Project has introduced the concepts of “Alterity Processing” and "Scripts of Alterity" to refer to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into “European-legible” identities. With respect to the state of the art, such conceptualizations allow accounting for the simultaneous enactment of individual “Others” and emergent European orders.
The Project has been successful in shifting the debate on migration management, security and institutional agency towards considering data processing of individual identities from a socio-technical, material and long-term perspective.
Most notably, the Project has introduced the concepts of “Alterity Processing” and "Scripts of Alterity" to refer to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into “European-legible” identities. With respect to the state of the art, such conceptualizations allow accounting for the simultaneous enactment of individual “Others” and emergent European orders.