Conference: Governing bodies and behaviours (ENS Lyon)

15-16 October 2020

Speakers: Claudia Aradau & Sarah Perret - Governing through data

In this paper, we propose to trace EASO practices of data collection and investigates the ways in which different injunctions come to count as data and what is discounted in these operations. To this purpose, we propose a conceptual distinction between digital ‘traces’ and ‘inscriptions.’ While digital traces are increasingly extracted from the bodies of migrants through fingerprinting, screening, facial recognition, or interviews, this data is processed, combined and recombined to become border inscriptions. It is through these digital ‘scriptural’ operations (Denis, 2018, 82) and compositions that migrant traces become devices of governing as border inscriptions.