CAREER: Migration, Human Rights, and Security

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a CAREER proposal that will unite research and education towards an in-depth analysis of humanitarian technologies. The PI will examine the emergence and consolidation of four technologies which straddle state-based and grass-roots responses to migration: GPS and ICT technologies, forensic DNA, isotope analysis, and biometrics. The systematic study of these technologies will provide new insights about migrations as spaces of innovation and experimentation on the part of migrants, and the rise of hybrid technologies which fuse human rights and security goals. Although migration is an important issue for theorizing the state, culture, surveillance, and citizenship, less focus has been given to it as a generator of scientific and technological innovation. In analyzing multiple technologies surrounding migrations which together act as hybrid technologies, deployed within both migrant rights communities and state-based law enforcement, this research offers a unique paradigm for empirically understanding migration and responses to it. The results of this research will offer new insights for technological governance and ethical practice, and it will serve to foster cross-disciplinary and transnational approaches to science and migration. The home institution offers an ideal site for engaging minority scholars and the community and to develop culturally relevant cross-disciplinary science and technology studies. This project is a study of migration as a space of knowledge production. It seeks to explore a contemporary zone of enforcement, surveillance and human rights organizing in North America. Drawing on the science and technology studies, critical studies of human rights, and migration theory, this study explores the role of innovation within the global migration and regimes’ concerns related to it. The project will use a layered case study method that combines ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, participatory mapping, and archival research to analyze innovative uses of multiple technologies surrounding migration and their role in migrant subject formation. Through ethnographic research with forensic laboratories and law enforcement initiatives; interviews with scientists, technology developers, and innovators; and participatory mapping and interviews with migrants, the proposal seeks to elucidate the technological practices which shape integration. The results of this project will contribute to the ethnography of the state, science, and contemporary citizenship from the vantage point of people on the move. This project adds a new dimension to the theorization of migration, bringing critical attention to the role of science as a knowledge-making arena. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.