Call for papers on Digitalisation and Migration, May 2022

Call for papers for Panel Workshop on Digitalisation and Migration at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Congress, May 25th-31st 2022, St Petersburg.  

https://iuaes2022.spb.ru/results/panel/101/

'Being on the move and being human in the digital age: digital discrimination and its effects'

Panel abstract: Mobilities are increasingly dependent on digital technologies and the use of cyberspace. Movements have always been political, aspirational and selective but the very ways in which power and movements intersect have been rendered more difficult to discern against digital backdrops. Consequently, it is becoming crucial to examine how digital technologies both enable and limit physical movements as well as ideas of cultural belonging. While they are made use of to claim agency and to gain access, they have also metamorphosed into tools for surveillance and exclusion. Digital means, therefore, play an essential part in what a ‘world on the move’ looks like for different people, and the ways in which place and space can be made and inhabited. The main question this panel focuses on is: what role does digitalisation play in constraining and enabling migration-related practices. How does coded technology shape who gets to move and who is prevented from moving? How might socio-cultural difference become reinforced and/or undermined through digitalisation? Does digital technology trap people in immobility and discrimination or does it provide them with strategies to escape from it? Does technology enable people and bureaucracies to manipulate notions of socio-cultural difference as a means to either facilitate or prevent migration, and how?

This panel is being organised by Dr Leah Junck who is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) and Dr Marketa Dolezalova who is a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds working on a project on Labour Mobility in Transition: a multi-actor study of the re-regulation of migrant work in low-skilled sectors

Anyone interested in submitting a paper to the panel can submit an abstract by February 1st by following the guidance in the call for papers here: IUAES Saint-Petersburg 2022 Congress (iuaes2022.spb.ru) '