Virtual borders: human rights and the fluid subject of algorithmic governance
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.
Date: 3 March 2023, 10:00 (Friday, 7th week, Hilary 2023)
Venue: Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road OX1 3TB
Venue Details: Seminar Room 2
Speaker: Dr Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University of London)
Organising department: Refugee Studies Centre
Organiser contact email address: rsc@qeh.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Refugee Studies Centre Public Seminar Series
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Tamsin Kelk