Skip to main content
IHSS

Technologies of expulsion: Refugees’ carcerality and the technological disruptions of asylum

When: Tuesday, February 8, 2022, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Online, Ms Teams

Speaker: Dr Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths University of London)

Mobile People Events Series

Join Dr Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths University of London) who investigates the carceral spaces and mechanisms at play in refugee governmentality, digital technologies in refugee humanitarianism and explore her debates on refugees' carcerality. 

Introducing the notion of “technologies of expulsion”, Dr Martina Tazzioli argues 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 argues 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.

About the speaker

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.

The chair

Prof Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London) will chair the event. 

About Mobile People

This event forms part of the Mobile People programme of work. It is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme at Queen Mary University of London, Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Politics and International Relations. For more information please visit IHSS Ongoing projects page. 

Back to top