Smart Borders
Project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer.
Creative Commons: Patent drawing for Joseph F. Glidden's Improvement to barbed wire (24 November 1874)
From US President Biden’s proposal for a ‘smart wall’ along the US-Mexico border to the biometric registration of refugees to obtain humanitarian aid, contemporary migration and border policing increasingly employ digital, automated, and algorithmic technologies to control and manage movement and mobility. These technologies present themselves as smart or intelligent claiming to reduce discrimination and violence and purportedly enacting more humane and just forms of migration and border policing. However, so-called smart borders reproduce racial discrimination and violence of borders. This project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer asks: How does the emergence of “smart borders” transform possibilities of movement and articulations of identity, citizenship, belonging, and exclusion? What are the histories of situating borders as smart or intelligent through the use of media technologies? Located at the intersections of digital media studies, critical migration and border studies and political anthropology this multi-sited, multi-modal study draws from original interview materials with software engineers, policymakers, and migrant networks and uses discourse and archival analysis to critically examine how borders are framed as intelligent.