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p>The so-called hotspots—identification and registration centres on the Aegean Islands in Greece and in Italy—are not only sites of remote detention, European intervention or differential inclusion, but also logistical set-ups, where data is generated and spread across state institutions. Such socio-technical assemblages are hard to research not on...
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Context 1
... I focused on trajectories and tried to map them, the forms and documents especially attracted my attention (Figure 4). I decided to conduct further interviews and asked which documents are used, what classifications are defined, how they are filled out, and how they are used for data entries. ...
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... Indeed, enrolment "describe[s] the group of multilateral negotiations, trials of strength and tricks that accompany the interessements and enable them to succeed" (Callon 1984, 10). Our focus on interessement and enrolment ultimately enables us to scrutinise the position of locally embedded CSO's vis-a-vis the complex and patchy institutional landscape through which EUrope's externalised borders are enacted (Bourne, Johnson, and Lisle 2015;Broeders and Dijstelbloem 2016;Glouftsios and Scheel 2021;Pelizza 2021;Pollozek 2020;Scheel 2021). Before we present how this conceptual approach results in insightful empirical findings, we outline our methods and clarify how we concretely differentiate organisations according to their local or international character. ...
The end of a long-standing autocratic regime in The Gambia renewed EUrope’s geopolitical interest in the externalisation of (return) migration management to the West African country. Since 2017, EUrope has financed several programmes implemented by a combination of international and local actors. Analysing original qualitative data through the lens of the sociology of translation (SoT) offered by actor-network theory (ANT), this paper explores the incorporation of locally owned civil society organisations (CSOs) within the socio-material network of externalisation. As such, it engages with the understudied perspective of Southern implementers in the context of migration management. In our analysis, we put central two notions of SoT: interessement and enrolment. With the first, we show how the development and migrant-protection interests of locally owned CSOs are brought in alignment with the EUropean objective of curtailing irregular migration. This process of interessement is never complete, but leaves room for excess positions, which here correspond to the locally owned CSOs’ criticism of EUrope’s appropriation of Gambian natural resources, practical organisation of migration management and excessive immobilisation of Gambians. The notion of enrolment refers to the processes of negotiation addressing part of these excess positions. Even with enrolment being successful, locally owned CSOs keep imagining, and to some extent, performing alternative ways of dealing with migration. Such alternative thinking and practicing will overtake the EUropean only if multiple and stable connections arise around it. Our ANT-driven analysis demonstrates that local implementers endorse EUropean migration management because they broadly see it as beneficial; yet, with their criticism, requests and imagination, manage to limitedly alter it, and may, potentially, transform it.
... In this regard, attention to politics of location in research on EU borders is raised from two different angles. Behind the frontstage of bordering, such as camps and hotspots and detention sites, Pollozeck (2020) argues, is the 'elsewhere,' such as in databases of Eurodoc or headquarters of Frontex and Europol. With the physical camp Moria burnt down during the time of writing this introduction, Pollozeck's article remains witness to the camp's ongoing social life as a 'logistical set-up,' where data is generated and spread across state institutions. ...
This thematic issue is a collection of articles reflecting on methods as border devices of hierarchical inclusion spanning migration, mobility and border studies. It maps some key concerns and responses emerging from what we call academic backstages of migration, mobility and border research by younger academics. These concerns are around (dis)entangling positions beyond Us/Them (i.e. researcher/researched), delinking from the spectacle of migration and deviating from the categories of migration apparatuses. While these concerns are not new in themselves the articles however situate these broader concerns shaping migration, mobility and border studies within specific contexts, dilemmas, choices, doubts, tactics and unresolved paradoxes of doing fieldwork. The aim of this thematic issue is not to prescribe “best methods” but in fact to make space for un-masking practices of methods as unfinished processes that are politically and ethically charged, while nevertheless shedding light in (re)new(ed) directions urgent for migration, mobility and border studies. Such an ambition is inevitably partial and situated, rather than comprehensive and all-encompassing. The majority of the contributions then enact and suggest different modes of reflexivity, ranging from reflexive inversion, critical complicity, collective self-inquiry, and reflexive ethnography of emotions, while other contributions elaborate shifts in research questions and processes based on failures, and doubts emerging during fieldwork. We invite the readers to then read the contributions against one another as a practice of attuning to what we call a ‘cacophony of academic backstages,’ or in other words, to the ways in which methods are never settled while calling attention to the politics of knowledge production unfolding in everyday fieldwork practices.
In this paper, we investigate the temporal implications of data in law enforcement and border control. We start from the assumption that the velocity of knowledge and action is defined by heterogeneous formations and interactions of various actors, sites, and materials. To analyze these formations and interactions, we introduce and unpack the concept of "data temporality." Data temporality explicates how the speed of knowledge and action in datafied environments unfolds in close correspondence with (1) variegated social rhythms, (2) technological inscriptions, and (3) the balancing of speed with other priorities. Specifically, we use the notion of data temporality as a heuristic tool to explore the entanglements of data and time within two case studies: Frontex' Joint Operation Reporting Application and the predictive policing software PRECOBS. The analysis identifies two key themes in the empirical constitution of data temporalities. The first one pertains to the creation of events as reference points for temporally situated knowledge and action. And the second one pertains to timing and actionability, that is, the question of when interventions based on data analysis should be triggered.
