CALL FOR PAPERS - Making public in the context of migration and border control. On securitization, non-citizenship, and secrecy

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 11:17:31 +0200

CALL FOR PAPERS - Special Issue

Making public in the context of migration and border control. On securitization, non-citizenship, and secrecy

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 30th, 2023

Full papers (in English with a maximum length of 8,000 words) will be due by April 30th 2024 and will be subject to a double blind peer review process.

The special issue (SI) focuses on the making and shaping of publics in the realm of migration and border control. In line with the open and critical approach of Tecnoscienza, it aims to foster dialogue at the intersection of STS and critical migration and border studies. On the one hand, it explores how STS inspired work on issue publics, heterogeneous collectives, and material forms of participation can stimulate research on migration and borders. On the other hand, it reflects upon frictions, limitations, and blind spots that arise when being translated from realms of techno science into those of security, non-citizenship, secrecy, and ignorance. It highlights discursive strategies, ambivalences, boundaries and (methodological) limitations, violence and resistance, and reflects upon the conditions of (im)possibility and the power effects regarding the socio-technical making and shaping of publics.
The SI both mobilizes and challenges the analytical vocabulary around issue publics and mundane technologies of public involvement from STS (Wynne, 2007). Publics are concerned "with indirect ‘consequences’ of human action, over which affected actors have no direct influence" (Marres 2007, 769) and they emerge, when people join forces in order to get involved and have a say on how issues should be dealt with. STS research has stressed the experimental and democratic character of such public formations as they address problems institutions "can't or don't want to contain" (Marres 2007, 769), or have not taken up yet. Consequently, research has focused on the labor, effort, and work in the sphere of the everyday outside of arenas of "Politics with capital P" (e.g. parliaments, governments, and other political bodies) and studied contingent processes of ‘publicizing’ and ‘de-publicizing’ of issues as well as the entanglement and disentanglement of actors and alliances including all its contestations and antagonisms (Marres and Lezaun 2011).

Importantly, in techno-society, making an issue into a public affair requires the involvement not only of a variety of stakeholders from different professions and policy makers, but also of objects. STS has inquired 'hybrid forums' that emerge around 'risky objects' (e.g. of pollution, radiation, or infection) and put emphasis on the role of techno-scientific knowledge, technologies, and devices generated both in 'professional' and 'citizen' science (Callon et al. 2009; Latour 2004, 2005). Moreover, materials have been studied in terms of their capacities in fostering public engagement and participation (Marres and Lezaun 2011). An STS inspired vocabulary on issues, publics, and their material settings has already been made productive for a wide array of research, such as urban infrastructures and urban planning, climate change, environment and sustainability, energy, food, and health (a.o.: Cook et al. 2004, Farias 2016, Pauwels 2011, Henwood and Marent 2019).
However, it has only occasionally picked up in research on security, migration, and borders. For instance, Dijstelbloem and Broeders (2015) have discussed non-publics, that is the difficulties of making publics in dispersed data ecologies of migration and border control, and Amelung and Machado (2019) have studied the emergence of issue-publics regarding bio-bordering policies in the UK. We are confident that an STS inspired analytics of publics bears more potential for research on migration and border control. It is crucial to bring attention to different publics involved in border games to understand their rules, tactics and effects by nourishing debates across disciplines (Walters 2015, 2022, Walters and D’Aoust 2015). At the same time, we think that various research directions at the intersection of STS and critical migration and border studies are instructive entry points for reflecting upon and discussing further matters on issues, publics, and technologies. Following recent contributions in this journal that have focused on “Borders, Migration, and Technology in the Age of Security“ (Trauttmansdorff 2022) and on the obduracy of informational migration management through maintenance and repair (Lausberg and Pelizza 2021), this special issue of Tecnoscienza: The Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies seeks to assemble research at the intersections between STS and critical migration and border studies. In particular, the special issue invites contributions that explore further and go beyond the following themes:
The first theme asks, how securitization and criminalization affect processes of making things public, when migrants and NGOs alike are turned into 'risky' and 'dangerous' subjects by state authorities. Research focusing on securitization has shown how migrants, NGOs and activist groups alike have been increasingly criminalized by state authorities. Migrants crossing borders are treated as criminals by cross checking databases not only related to asylum but also to policing, crime and terrorism (Amelung 2021). Categorized as 'irregular', they are exposed to nature (Schindel 2022), face military-led operations (Ibekwe 2022), or get incarcerated, detained, and deported (Jansen et al. 2014). NGOs carrying out Search and Rescue operations are denied access to harbors, and supporting migrants on the move has increasingly been framed as activities of smuggling and trafficking by state authorities (Cusumano and Villa 2020). This does not only account for NGOs supporting migrants at the European borders but also for volunteers e.g. at the Mexican/US border and elsewhere (Mezzadra 2020). By this, migrants and NGOs are marginalized and face intensified surveillance, policing, and prosecution, which brings to the fore the struggles, barriers, and impediments for affected actors to make things public and hold institutions of Politics
accountable.
Furthermore, with research on migration and border control, the ambivalences of technologies need to be inquired further. For instance, on the one hand smart phones are devices crucial for navigating through border zones, calling for help, documenting fundamental rights abuses in border events, storing documents, keeping connected with family, friends, companions, and solidary actors, and exchanging information and experiences in fora (Diminescu 2008; Leurs and Ponzanesi 2014). On the other hand, they can become tools of surveillance and control for state actors by reading them out – justified by security interests – in situations of identification, reconstructing migratory routes, scanning through social media, or tracing networks of users (Giillespie et al. 2018; Gabrielsen Jumbert et al. 2018). Hence, research needs to be attentive to and situate the conditions that turn mundane technologies into devices of engagement and participation, as well as of surveillance and control.
The second theme for engaging further with issues, publics, and technologies concerns non-citizenship. How does it affect processes of ‘publicizing’ and ‘de-publicizing’, when issue formation takes place not only outside the arena of capital P Political institutions, but also at the boundaries of legality? Critical migration and border studies research point to the legal and material conditions of (im)possiblity of making things public that concern non-citizens. Migrants as non-citizens find themselves in a delicate relationship with the public sphere. The latter bears risk of attracting the attention of state institutions, getting exposed, and facing consequences of policing, detention, or deportation. Consequently, non-citizens need to negotiate when and in which ways they would like to ‘go public’, and when they rather remain ‘imperceptible’ and avoid being identified as a particular subject of migration (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). Still, in ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008), non-citizens may question their ambivalent relationship to the public sphere by criticizing the underlying distinction between citizens and non-citizens e.g. through protests in camps, at borders and detention centers around the world (Johnson 2012). Moreover, entering the realm of the public through campaigning or protesting is demanding, since a precarious legal status comes along with many further forms of precariousness. When people are struggling with housing, health, work, and other issues due to the lack of social services, one may wonder how capacities can be mobilized for all the time-consuming and laborious activities from organizing meetings, attending protests, to articulating claims and requests. Furthermore, engaging with longer-term campaigns or trials might require conditions, which often are hardly compatible with the lifeworlds of irregularized people who are on the move and/or do not have a fixed or official address or the same phone number over longer time periods.
Making publics around issues of non-citizens is also challenging for activities and volunteer groups as there is no strong lobby for people with limited access to political rights and political representation. Even though there are options of turning state institutions into public affairs, for instance by issuing complaints or initiating a trial, they usually require know-how and professional expertise, resources and time – something, particularly small(er) grass-root organizations do not have, and which needs to be balanced carefully with other pressing tasks and issues. They also face strategies and tactics of national authorities and other policy actors that cut the involvement of activist and migrant voices short in political fora of investigation. In addition, organizations such as Search and Rescue NGOs often refer to international law in their advocacy for non-citizens, but often the global conditions of this law do still render migrants rightless (Mann 2018).
The third theme refers to secrecy and (strategic) ignorance. How do conditions of secrecy and strategies of ignorance shape or even impede issue publics around migration and border control? Even though scandals, investigations, or court hearings might shed some light on obscured institutional ecologies, technologies, and infrastructures of migration and border control, engaging with them is usually constrained by limited or no access, blackened documents, and confidentiality clauses. Recent research has shown how making things public requires navigating through different forms of secrecy as part of intricate and laborious modes of investigation by negotiating access to documents and understanding the logic of algorithms (Aradau & Blanke 2021, de Goede, Bosma & Pallister-Wilkins 2020, Scheel 2013).
In this context, research on migration and border regimes points to strategies of ignorance and denial as well as to the complexities of holding accountable. For instance, pushbacks in border zones in Greece, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, and other countries have been repeatedly documented and made public, but nevertheless ignored, denied, and complaints dismissed by state institutions (Davies et al. 2017). Civil society actors have started to provide counter-statistics on migrants dying e.g. in the Sahara region or in the Mediterranean while state agencies depoliticize data on border deaths (Heller and Pécaud 2020). Moreover, through the complexity of migration and border policies and multi-stakeholder operations from local police to mixed Frontex border guard units, people affected face the difficulty of holding specific security actors accountable (Gkliati and Rosenfeldt 2018; Campesi 2018). It may even be the case that issues are known, widely accepted, and condemned by many but still persist – such as the unbearable conditions of camps on the Aegean islands, the Pacific islands and elsewhere, which have been criticized for years.
We invite contributions that examine the conditions of (im)possibility, the becoming, and the shaping of publics in the realm of migration and border control. Contributions may refer to but also may go beyond the following topics:

- publics and the the securitization and criminalization of migration
- technologies as devices of engagement and participation as well as of surveillance and control
- publics under conditions of non-citizenship and precarity
- institutional hurdles and barriers of making publics
- secrecy and (strategic) ignorance of migration and border control actors
- politics of (non)accountability
- publics in times of crisis

Deadline for abstract submissions: October 30th, 2023

Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 500 words should be sent as email attachments to tecnoscienza.specialissue@gmail.com and carbon copied to the guest editors. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by mid-November 2023. Full papers (in English with a maximum length of 8,000 words including notes and references) will be due by April 30th 2024 and will be subject to a double blind peer review process.

We expect to publish the special issue in 2025.

For information and questions, please do not hesitate to contact the guest editors:
Silvan Pollozek, pollozek@europa-uni.de
Maria Ullrich, maria.ullrich@uni-bonn.de
Olga Usachova, olga.usachova@phd.unipd.it

References

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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies: Announcements

CALL FOR PAPERS - Making public in the context of migration and border control. On securitization, non-citizenship, and secrecy

Tecnoscienza has a new website!