Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Sociocultural Dimensions of New Biometric Security Infrastructures

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

What is the impact of the expanding role of technology in our social and political lives today? The increasing ubiquity of certain technological objects, specifically in the form of proliferating interfaces, is immediately observable. However, identification and security technologies such as biometrics and even mundane forms like electronic databases are more opaque to us. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, will use scientific fieldwork-based methods to examine one of the most salient features of modern life today: large-scale, networked databases. Given heightening security concerns, in relation to the United States and its global affairs, it is crucial to investigate how databased identification technologies intersect with security and governance practices. This project will develop an empirical understanding of security infrastructures; it asks how they percolate into social domains such as kinship, migration, commerce, and dwelling practices, shaping aspects of ordinary life seemingly far outside the purview of security. It will enhance understandings of the social and political implications of security practices as they bear upon public policy, social and geopolitical relations. Thus, it will facilitate the development of programs and policies in order to produce secure yet equitable social environments. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, findings will be disseminated to organizations and individuals that explore and manage the causes, consequences, and complexities of security practices. Zehra Hashmi, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Hull of the University of Michigan, will explore the relationship between new security infrastructures, kinship, and social organization. This research focuses on one of the pioneers in national biometric identification: Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), and manner and means in which it shapes domains of everyday social life. NADRA's significance lies in its ubiquity: the card is used for banking, paying bills, school admissions, acquiring a cell phone chip, property transactions and voting. Key actors involved in NADRA operations are algorithms that integrate and verify data, particularly familial relations creating kin units. This research will analyze how NADRA reconstitutes kin ties by studying its effects on Pashtun migrants in Islamabad, for whom the identity card is a central preoccupation. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Pashtun neighborhoods and NADRA's institutional sites, this research asks how NADRA's identification processes shape conceptions of security in a more generalizable manner. This study will collect data on how NADRA informs claims and experiences of urban space, especially for the ethnically marginalized. Further, it will investigate how NADRA itself is shaped by citizens, and what this reveals about governance and security practices. Thus, this study will illuminate connections between databases, security practices, and the status of ethnic minorities as they crystalize into a single, state-organized information infrastructure. This holds broad comparative implications and generalizable insights for the growing role of biometric, information and surveillance technologies for governance elsewhere on the globe, particularly the United States.