#44 Digitising Migrants: Annalisa Pelizza on the European immigration crisis in an age of Big Data

This is the 7th episode in our Science and Technology interview series. This time, Jodie is interviewing Annalisa Pelizza, Professor in Technology Studies of Communication at the University of Bologna in Italy, Visiting Professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and lead investigator on the project "Processing Citizenship: Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe". They talk about the way that digital infrastructures, such as the databases used to collect information from migrants when they first arrive on European soil, actually help to shape these people into migrants, basically constructing them as a different category of person than perhaps they were before they arrived.

“Migration issues in Europe are a hot topic right now - it's not news that they have been used in the last 50 years as a way to steer public opinion into right wing positions... They are mobilised as elements in a narration of invasion, losing cultural specificities - not only individuals are mobilised, but there are also infrastructures that createpeople as migrants - not having access to proper work, or being put into certain infrastructures from which it’s virtually impossible to get out, createspeople as migrants, as outsiders to society.”

The project uses multi-sited and multi-scale ethnographic methods. A team of 4 persons including Professor Pelizza conducted research in Greece in 2018 at 4 Hotspots (registration centers), then in Germany, and are now going to work in Italy and at the EU Commission. They are the first researchers to have such access after the Turkish-European agreement.

For a list of key terms mentioned, check out our website: https://wordpress.com/post/thefamiliarstrange.com/2556

Links and Citations

Project’s website: http://processingcitizenship.eu and @ProcessCitizens

Latest publication from Project: “Processing Alterity, Enacting Europe” out open access on Science, Technology and Human Values: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0162243919827927

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Shownotes by Jodie-Lee Trembath