Dr. Michelle Pfeifer
Dr. Michelle Pfeifer is postdoctoral research associate at Dresden University of Technology in the Chair of Digital Cultures. Their research is located at the intersections of (digital) media technology, migration and border studies, and gender and sexuality studies and explores the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge amidst struggles over mobility and movement(s) in postcolonial Europe.
Michelle earned their PhD at the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Their book manuscript The Sonic Border Regime: Voice, Race, and Technology in Digital Borderlands takes the so-called refugee crisis as a point of departure to probe how algorithmic and sonic media infrastructures have been employed for migration control, border policing, and asylum administration on a planet where global displacement has become a new norm.Michelle shows how this data-driven form of border and migration control (re)orders articulations of personhood, belonging, and exclusion by valorizing racial and ethnic identification for purposes of surveillance and policing. Working from a critical race, queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspective, they situate contemporary border technologies within a colonial genealogy of producing cultural and racial difference in Europe.
Michelle is currently working on the research project One Million Refugees: Numbers and the Sexuality of Statistics thatanalyzes the sexual and gendered politics of migration data. The project interrogates how the production and circulation of numbers in refugee quotas, allocation keys, and migration statistics are used to authorize bordering practices that decrease possibilities for family unification and pathologize the migrant family. They further connect these strategies to the eugenicist and colonial genealogies of population control to argue that migration statistics, while conjured as objective indicators, are central in framing migration in Europe as crisis and situating migrants as a racialized threat of biological and social contagion.
Michelle’s research has been published in Navigationen, Citizenship Studies, Culture Machine and the anthology Thinking with an Accent from the University of California Press. They co-edited the special issue “The Sexual Politics of Border Control” published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and co-organized the international symposium “Sexuality and Borders”at New York University. Michelle teaches courses on media, identity, and digital cultures as well as critical pedagogy and methods in media studies. They currently serve as Student & Early Career Representative for the Philosophy, Theory and Critique division of the International Communication Association and are a founding member of CaRe: Capacious Relations working group of stsing e.V.. Previously, they were Managing Editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and member of the editorial collective of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Michelle is the recipient of a doctoral research fellowship from the Berlin Program at Free University Berlin and a dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren foundation as well as grants and awards from the Global Research Initiative at New York University, the NYU Migration Network and the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division of the International Communications Association. Michelle is an alumna of the German National Academic Foundation and holds an MA in Social and Cultural Analysis from NYU and a BA from Amsterdam University College.