As part of the our Research Colloquium series, the International Relations and Political Science Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Dr Martina Tazzioli of Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Abstract: The use of AI for identifying and tracking migrants at the border and in refugee camps has gained traction in academic debates. In this talk I discuss how the techno-hype in research on borders has inflected analyses on migration control in terms of tracking, surveillance and bias, ending up in ‘seeing (migration) like a State’(Scott, 1998). Building on research conducted in Greece, I analyse the digital and biometric technologies implemented in refugee camps funded by the EU, to show the interlocking modes of control exercised on migrants, illustrating how they contribute to enforce carcerality beyond detention. I argue that these require to move beyond technological fixes. In the final part I interrogate what an abolitionist approach to techno-humanitarianism might look like, shifting attention from AI as such towards an intersectional approach to border violence. 
 

About the speaker

Martina Tazzioli is Reader in Politics & Technology in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Goldsmiths College, University of London.  She is the author of The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders (Sage, 2019), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (Palgrave, 2016). Her forthcoming book, Border Abolitionism: Migration Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles (Manchester University Press) will come out in 2023. She is co-editor in chief of Politics Journal and a member and on the editorial board of Radical Philosophy.