Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, Jouni Häkli, Gintarė Kudžmaitė and Aila Spathopoulou-Between hope and despair: Gatekeeping as (dis)embodied mobility regulation in the EU
The European Union is seeking “a fresh start on migration in Europe” including “a new balance between responsibility and solidarity” through the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. The emerging policy has a twofold strategy: asylum assessment is increasingly managed at the external borders of the EU, while humanitarian support is mostly offered in the member states. We analyze this strategy in terms of (dis)embodied gatekeeping by first exploring how the seemingly neutral policy language of the New Pact construes migrants as governable bodies and, second, how this links with particular forms of mobility regulation as executed in bordering practices in Greece. The paper draws from two ongoing research projects: “The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking” (Kallio, Häkli & Kudžmaitė) and “Bordering and governmentality around the Greek islands” (Spathopoulou).
The figure of the gate opens many analytical dimensions. Greece itself represents a gate of/to Europe with its emerging ‘multipurpose camps’ that operate a two-fold function. Regulating mobility to and from the camp, they are neither closed nor open but always potentially both: an entrance point and closure to asylum. As a governing strategy, gatekeeping is simultaneously embodied and disembodied, proximal and distanced, holding the promise of encounter and non-encounter.
Whereas the language of the New Pact operates symbolically, the actual work of gatekeeping is divided between technological and human labor. Disembodied gatekeeping includes digital asylum cards tied to the functioning of the multipurpose camp gates. Yet, when disembodied governance fails, or when mobility or stagnation needs to be boosted, gatekeeping takes an embodied form. Specifically, the precarious workforce of cultural mediators backs up the digitalized bordering system, carrying out
in person the ‘dirty work’ of physically encountering asylum seekers on behalf the European Union.
Gintaré Kudžmaité- The social potential of AI-generated portrayals of migrants, migration and borders
Newly publicly available and easily accessible forms of AI (image generators, chatbots, etc.) introduce unresolved capacities for people to acquire information and to creatively engage with it. These are powerful tools, and yet we know very little about the social potential of the knowledge they generate. This paper invites to start closing this gap by investigating the (hopeful) social potential of AI-generated portrayals of migrants, migration and borders.
States, governments, groups and individuals are divided between the many complex attitudes towards different kinds of (cross-border) human movement. AI has been learning from this complexity. Thus, this paper urges to ask: what can we learn from AI-generated portrayals of migrants, migration and borders, which essentially mirror our own frame of mind?
In this paper, I primarily aim to critically overview some of the existing knowledge of social potential of AI. I will synthesize and apply that knowledge to further elaborate on the potentials of AI’s portrayals of migration/borders. Then, I will use my first preliminary analysis findings to evaluate migration and border discourses generated by chosen AI systems and to investigate their links to the existing rhetoric on borders and migration. However, a pressing question of this paper is not only what major topical messages AI distributes to the public, but, more importantly, how these can influence individual and group interpretations of and actions towards various social pressures. Do these AI-generated narratives have a potential to be – or to gradually become – drivers of more positive living with and within precarious social processes?
Hannah Morgan- An affirmative biopolitics? Everyday smartphone practices and the (re)mediation of hostility
For irregular migrants in the European context, the smartphone has become a vital digital tool for mediating the everyday material, affective and discursive experiences of hostility that have become characteristic of mobility landscapes today. Although a vast range of work attends to how digital technologies have become embedded in wider governance assemblages across Europe, little work in geography has turned attention to the everyday, intimate and often embodied experiences of digital technologies: particularly the role that the smartphone plays in the doing of ‘everyday life’. In turning to the everyday context of smartphone practices for asylum seekers in the UK, I argue that it is important we remain open to the affirmative forms of living or flourishing that may emerge through everyday engagement with the smartphone.
Following the work of McKittrick (2011; 2013), I ask if we only ever conceptualise ‘asylum life’ through the lens of death, injury or control, what might we miss in the everyday lived realities ofdifferent governance regimes? Of course, hostility burns in the background of those going through the asylum application process, but how might forms of administered hostility get (re)mediated by users of smartphones, or indeed, other digital devices? Looking at everyday smartphone practices, what might we find in scrolling on social media, sending photographs, or video calling friends? I suggest that when we shift our lens to focus on the imaginative, affective and material geographiesthat are produced through such everyday actions, we can begin to understand how hostility — as a direct and intended effect of European state governance — gets (re)mediated through digital practices. In this paper, I outline how recentring everyday smartphone practices — tied to affective imaginations of hope — become ways for individuals to navigate the slow violence of hostile governance: an affirmative biopolitics.
Sanna Valtonen- Dwindling hope. The everyday life of undocumented migrants in the cycle of endless border practices
Exile and migration are often associated with hope for a better future and the very moment of crossing border with access to safety and relief (Kallio & al., 2019, Gunaratnam 2020). But what happens to hope when datafied border practices stretch in time (Scheel 2020) and become gaseous (Martin-Mazé & Perret 2021)? Borders are not only demarcation lines between territories, but complex and multiform practices that perpetuate meaning and physically shape the mobilities of people (Aru 2022, Vergnano 2021). Since border practices reinforce existing inequalities, it is important to understand ways marginalized groups experience borders (Ajana 2020, Metcalfe 2021, Nikunen and Valtonen 2023). In this paper, based on interviews, diaries and ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented migrants, I reflect on their experiences of borders and border practices. For them, the border does not appear as a clear physical/geographical entity but rather as a series of evaluation and verification processes, which expand in time and end only when the right to a space inside the border is granted. Borders represent concrete impossibilities and cyclical repeated official processes. Experiences of borders define everyday practices – where they move, how they act and how they anticipate things.
Data-based border processes rely on biopolitics, which considers the body and its biometrics as truth. In contrast, the stories and experiences of migrants are suspected (Madianou 2019). In asylum processes that drag on for years, both the border and the suspicion is encountered time after time. There is little understanding of how this determines the experience of an individual. This paper contributes to the multidisciplinary discussion of critical border research by engaging undocumented migrants as interlocutors and experts of being subject to border practices.. Even if being undocumented concerns radical experiences of invisibility, dispossession, and disappearance, traces of hope can be seen in practices orienting towards a desired-for future. Like datafied borders, hope turns away from the dominant linear temporalities and hides in mundane practices. However, it thins out over time while the bordering seems to just gain strength.