Subject: LAUNCH OF THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES RESEARCH NETWORK ON MIGRATION AND BORDER CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES AND INFRASTRUCTURES (STS-MIGTEC)

Description: STS-MIGTEC is an independent network of scholars at the intersection of science and technologies studies (STS) and critical migration, security and border studies. Founded in 2019, first, its aim is to provide a critical understanding of current developments, shifts and transformations of migration and border control heavily shaped by the development, implementation and usage of new technologies. Second, the network targets to create visibility of such research in order to stimulate overall scientific and informed public discourse.

The network assembles, stimulates and initiates work which examines migration and border control as complex entanglements between policies and regulations, technologies and other devices, people and practices and which is concerned with the following questions: How are migrant subjects shaped and affected by them? Which material and epistemic politics are involved? What power effects do such entanglements produce? In which ways do they shape and reconfigure migration and border control practices and forms of control? And how do they produce transnational migration and border regimes? What are ways to critically and publically engage with them? What roles do science and critical scholars have in that process?

Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic research it focuses, among others, on the following topics:
the development and design of migration and border technologies and the inscription of values, imaginaries, visions and ‘users’/affected persons
the co-shaping of migration and border technologies and border practices
data and information infrastructures of migration and border control
standards and work of standardisation and harmonisation
technologies as enabling devices for migrants
infrastructuring trans-organizational and trans-national institutional ecologies
mapping controversies concerning migration and border technologies
publics and public engagement
… (to be extended according to interests of new members)
The network seeks to bring researchers from different disciplines and around the world together and to initiate scientific exchange to produce synergies for relevant knowledge production. The collaborations result in organising workshops and conference panels, joint publications and preparing grant initiatives.
It is open to new members, including scholars and activists, and in particular migrants!