Event Details

The workshop aims to bring together interdisciplinary social critique of the technologies of everyday bordering and deportations in Britain. In doing so, this collective has the potential to form ethical and decolonised collaborative models of data governance practice and policy for, first, studying the mobilisation of technology in everyday exclusions in historic and current contexts, and second, illustrating how data science technologies can be used to engineer positive change, reducing biases

Keynote speaker: Professor Melissa Hamilton (University of Surrey)

Speakers: Dr Esmorie Miller (Lancaster), Dr Hannah Ishmael (Kings College London), Tactical Tech, and Dr Kathryn Cassidy (Northumbria)

This afternoon workshop seeks to discuss the technologies and impacts of everyday bordering and deportations in the hostile environment. Investigating the ways in which data and technology is used to create everyday bordering and deportations requires collaboration between data scientists, historians, criminologists and sociologists, and activists. The interdisciplinary expertise covers the following thematic areas: everyday bordering, whereby ordinary citizens are required to perform as border-guards; the use of technologies, including monitoring, tracking, personal profiling and linked data, to identify suspected illegitimates and exacerbate the power of everyday bordering; the use of predictive algorithms which embed the belief that race and social status are linked to illegality and illegitimate citizenship; how predictive algorithms obscure problems such as racial bias and infer skewed patterns in datasets that exacerbate social division; and, exploring contemporary everyday bordering as a longer historic trajectory where race intersected with Empire and coloniality.

Organised by Dr Zoe Alker [History] and Dr Esmorie Miller [School of Law] and supported by the Interdisciplinary Network Fund, Data Science Institute, Lancaster University.