DATAMIG WG3-Laboratory
Call for papers
“Writing and publishing about
‘Reflexive Resistance to Datafied Migration and Border Control’”
Online Workshop
16-17 September 2026
The theme of resistance to datafied migration and border control has come up across various DATAMIG activities across different working groups. This online workshop is dedicated to bringing together contributions, previously presented or inspired by previous DATAMIG meetings, engaging with that theme together with adding a layer of collective reflexivity, thus the workshop theme is “reflexive resistance to datafied migration and border control”. The workshop is dedicated to presenting initial work-in-progress and providing space for constructive and careful feedback. Following the workshop, there will be a call for papers for a special issue project where contributions can be submitted to.
The increasing datafication of migration and border control governance – through biometric databases, predictive algorithms, automated decision-making systems, and digitised surveillance infrastructures – has profoundly transformed how borders operate and how mobility is controlled. Yet alongside these developments, diverse forms of resistance have emerged: from grassroots digital activism to strategic litigation, from artistic interventions to investigative journalism, from academic critique to abolitionist organising.
This workshop brings together researchers, but also invites practitioners, activists, and artists working across and between these domains to become reflective of how we examine resistance to datafied migration and border control is enacted, sustained, and connected.
We invite contributions that engage critically and creatively, but also reflexively, with the politics of resistance in this field, addressing questions such as: What forms does resistance take in response to datafied and algorithmic borders and migration control regimes? How do diverse actors collaborate across differences? What tensions arise between reformist and abolitionist approaches? And what role can critical scholarship itself play as a mode of intervention?
Taking these questions as a starting point, we want to push discussions a step further. Engaging with critical migration and border studies, social movement studies, science and technology studies, feminist and decolonial studies, black studies, among others, we invite contributors to engage with what has been called the “reflexive turn” which can be found across the different fields in different forms and to propose paths forward. Based on the recognition that knowledge production is always situated, political, and potentially implicated in the power structures it describes, the different versions of reflexivity have in common to critically examine how our own categories, epistemologies, methods, and institutional positions shape the knowledge we produce. We ask how we can move forward from acknowledging the reflexive challenges and do the study of resistance otherwise? How can we practice reflexive epistemic resistance?
Contributions can be of theoretical or empirical analytical nature or both. They can include multi-modal forms of presentation, including text, sound, image, print, and digital modalities such as digital mapping. They shall address, but are not limited to, at least one of the following three intersecting themes AND shall engage with a reflexive challenge for scientific research:
- Modes of Resistance
- Digital resistance and refusal: How do migrants and their allies navigate, subvert, or refuse datafied systems? What strategies of obfuscation, non-compliance, and digital self-defence are being developed?
- Counter-monitoring and counter-surveillance: Practices of mapping, documenting, and archiving state violence at borders; turning the surveillant gaze back on institutions and their infrastructures.
- Journalistic investigations: The role of investigative journalism in exposing the workings of border technologies, corporate actors, and governmental opacity.
- Advocacy and campaigning: Organised efforts to challenge specific technologies, policies, or practices through public pressure, coalition-building, and political mobilisation.
- Legal interventions: Strategic litigation, freedom of information requests, and other legal mechanisms used to contest datafied border regimes and establish precedent.
- Multi-modal and art-based activism: Film, photography, performance, digital art, and other creative practices as sites of critique, witness, and alternative world-making.
- Critical pedagogies: The mobilization of critical knowledge for educational purposes of diverse publics, ranging from students,
- Critical analysis as epistemic intervention: The political work of scholarship; how academic research can unsettle dominant knowledge regimes and contribute to movements for change.
- Objectives and Directions of Resistance
- Problematizing the ‘datafication’ of migration and border control and the gaps of data on state violence harming migrants: Gaining critical literacy of technologized, datafied, AI-fied migration and border control and understanding their harms for migrants
- Opposing the authoritarian turn: Connections between anti-migration politics, fascism, and authoritarianism and datafication; resistance that situates border struggles within broader political contestations.
- Constructing new narratives: Efforts to challenge and replace dominant representations of migration with counter-narratives centred on migrant agency, structural violence, and freedom of movement.
- Countering opacity of datafication: Strategies for accessing, interpreting, and publicising state documents, algorithmic logics, and institutional practices otherwise hidden from view.
- From reform to abolition: Tensions, complementarities, and strategic questions between reformist interventions and abolitionist horizons in resistance.
- Collaborations and Connections of Resistance
- Solidarity networks: The formation and sustenance of networks that connect migrants, activists, researchers, technologists, lawyers, and artists across borders and disciplines.
- Coalitions around specific border struggles: How different communities come together around particular sites, routes, or technologies of control; the possibilities and frictions of coalition work.
- Participatory methodologies: Collaborative and participatory approaches to research and action that challenge extractive models and centre the knowledge and leadership of those most affected.
- Connecting travelling resistance: How ideas, tactics, and solidarities move and connect across contexts; the circulation and translation of resistance practices between different border regimes.
- Imaginaries of resistance: How do collective experiences, memories and histories of resistance enable imagination of futures of resistance; the enabling impact of imagination and speculation for alternative collectivizing futures of resistance.
PLUS Reflexive Challenges for Scientific Research
- Positionalities: reflexive engagement with our own embeddedness in knowledge production, situated experiences and perspectives, socio-political entanglements, researcher’s privileges and possible harm
- (Re)producing categories and blind spots: critical engagement with how migrant and migration categories are reproduced and how migration research can be complicit in nation-state frameworks—using state-produced categories, datasets, and epistemic lenses
- Tech-Hype versus situating tech in wider struggles: overrepresentation and normalizing datafication, technologies and AI in migration and border control
- Ethics: responsibility of researchers and protection of collaborators versus extractivist and exploitative research
- Practicing epistemic solidarity versus epistemic harm/violence: exposure of strategies and tactics versus critical understanding and emancipatory, collaborative empowerment of civic resistances
- Knowledge politics: relations between scientific approaches, activism and activist research, appreciation of/tensions across diverse knowledge holders and collective modes of knowledge production
- Collaborations in writing and publishing: knowledge production, academic writing and publishing with migrants, practitioners, activists, and artists
- Overcoming eurocentric ignorance: engaging with epistemic blindspots when it comes to geographies of border struggles and marginalized epistemic legacies
- Methodologies: what and how methods and methodologies can be used which are mindful of responsible collaborations and solidarity with interlocutors
Workshop format
The workshop format will include sessions with paper presentations providing feedback on how to advance (early) work-in-progress. Additionally, a session on “How to sustain Collaborative Research of DATAMIG Members”, discussing funding strategies, mentoring schemes, and initiatives for collaborations of participants will take place.
Submission Guidelines
We welcome proposals for papers (extended abstracts/short papers) together with 15-minute presentations. Abstracts should be 250 words and include a title, author name(s), institutional affiliation (if applicable), and contact email. Please also share a short bio of 150 words. We particularly encourage submissions from early-career researchers, independent scholars, activists and those with lived experience of migration and border regimes.
Submission deadline: 24 August 2026
Notification of acceptance: 26 August 2026
Submission of extended abstracts (500 words + references) or short papers (1.500-2.000 words + references): 7 September 2026.
Please send submissions to: [email protected].
Organiser
Nina Amelung, CIES-Iscte
(Participants interested in joining the organizing team are welcome to get in touch with [email protected])
