When: Tuesday, February 8, 2022, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PMWhere: Online, Ms Teams
Speaker: Dr Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths University of London)
Introducing the notion of “technologies of expulsion”, Dr Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths, University of London) argued that digital technologies in refugee humanitarianism are mainly used for obstructing migrants’ access to asylum and rights. By intertwining literature on the technologization of refugee governmentality with carceral geography scholarship she explores the restructuring of modes of confinement enforced through technology.
She argued that instead of taking for granted how technologies affect migrants, we should inquire which harms they generate on them; methodologically, this implies challenging a citizen-gaze on technological harms and seeing like a migrant. Focusing on Greece, she illustrates that hampering asylum seekers’ access to the asylum procedure and financial and humanitarian support are more than surveillance. She then investigates the carceral spaces and mechanisms at play in refugee governmentality. Joining the debates on carcerality with Jasbir Puar’s work on the politics of maiming, Dr Tazzioli contends that carceral mechanisms are enforced beyond detention and beyond surveillance and shows that these consist in the active spatial harassment and stealing of migrants’ time.
Dr Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths. She is the author of The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (Sage, 2020), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). She is co-editor in Chief of the Journal Politics and on the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. Her new book project, entitled Border abolitionism: migration containment and the memory of struggles and rescue is under contract with Manchester University Press.