OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Final seminar in a series on ‘Forced Migration and Digital Technologies: (Dis)continuities in Actors and Power Relations’. Seminar abstract: Who is the subject of human rights? This concern, which has been at the heart of postcolonial and feminist critiques on liberal human rights, has a renewed importance in the literature of algorithmic governance, where anxieties about the loss of human agency and autonomy are prevalent. In this talk, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche explores how digital technologies of data collection and analysis entail new forms of subject-making that displace and disrupt the liberal subject at the heart of human rights law. Drawing on an empirical study of data-driven border control projects developed in the EU and the UK, this talk observes how the placement of people in patterns of data – described by the EU Commission as the ‘unsupervised uncovering of correlations’ – enacts a new subject of governance: the fleeting and fluid ‘cluster’ (of data points, propensities, inferred attributes). This development, the paper argues, risks eroding existing legal safeguards (in anti-discrimination law, for example) and troubles the conditions of possibility for collective political action. Yet, in response to these problems, a return to ideals of the liberal human subject might neither be possible nor desirable.