Talk by Michelle Pfeifer @ Media Technologies for/against MigrantsRound­table | ICA Toronto | May 2023

Media Technologies for/against MigrantsRoundtable at ICA 2023, Toronto, May 25-29

Migration has been a constant phenomenon across the modern era, yet imminentplanetary climate change precipitates an acceleration of peoples moving across theworld in search of hospitable lands. At the same time, rising nativist movements acrossEurope and North America fight to exclude migrant groups and erode citizenship rights.Finally, news coverage and fictional media representation continue to make this apressing, contentious, and fraught subject. How does media and communication studiesintervene in the politics of 21st century migration?This roundtable considers the relationship between migrant subjects and new mediatechnologies as an intersectional investigation into the politics of citizenship, ecology,and mediation. Our approach analyzes two complementary facets. First is mediaagainst migrants, whether in topic (e.g. YouTube series promoting racist ideologiesabout refugees) or in use (e.g. drone cameras surveilling border crossings). Second ismedia for migrants, as in the ways that peoples on the move mobilize mediatechnologies to facilitate such transnational movements or to advocate for themselves.Roundtable participants will address a variety of issues within these two facets,including methodology, intermediality, comparativism, decolonization, andresearch-creation. Participants will draw on examples from their own scholarship andpractice to speak to these issues. How do digital technologies, portable video, or socialmedia require shifting our understandings and analyses of migration? In what waysmust we develop unique approaches to contend with the current media moment?Participants’ expertise lies on the intersection of media and migration as it operates inNorth America and Europe, two areas notorious for their emergent technological andbureaucratic means of managing and deterring migration. How do the legacies ofcolonialism, Cold War politics, and the War on Terror continue to inform how newmedia and communication technologies are deployed against people on the move?The format of this roundtable will consist of short opening statements from each of thepanelists. It will then proceed to a series of conversations between panelists promptedby questions formulated by the chair. Finally, it will open up for a broader conversationbetween panelists and the audience.

Michelle Pfeifer will draw on examples from their ethnographic and archival research on media technological surveillance of migration in Europe to emphasize the centrality of time, temporality, and history in the study of media and migration. They discuss the history of database surveillance of migrants in Germany to show how crises, emergency and urgency, modes that are central for governing migration in the 21st century, have to be continuously enacted and legitimated. Media technologies here often become measures of reform that expand the media technological surveillance of migration. Second, the analyze the repurposing of infrastructures for refugee camps and asylum registration centers and show how this repurposing gives insight into the temporal control of migration and the colonial and military genealogies of migration control. From these examples Michelle reflects on the need for new methodologies for the study of media and migration that include both historical and speculative approaches. 
Chair: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (University of Pennsylvania)

link: https://www.icahdq.org/mpage/ICA23