The COST Action CA 22135 DATAMIG (Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control) is a four-year COST Action running between 2024 and 2027. DATAMIG focuses on the datafication of migration and border control, which cannot be understood merely as a technical matter. It reconfigures practices and rationalities of migration and border control, it fosters new transnational alliances between and beyond state actors, and it raises many contentious issues, such as transparency and accountability. DATAMIG builds on the extant body of scholarship and insight. It sets up an integrated research framework, ensures up-to-date research, it keeps track of the highly dynamic and increasingly transnational field of datafied migration and border control, and it fosters research strategies and methodologies that engage critically with securitized, racialized and increasingly violent datafied borders. For further details, see the Memorandum of Understanding – MoU and the Action DATMIG website.
The activities in DATAMIG are structured in three Working Groups (WGs): WG1: Inventory, WG2: Observatory WG3: Laboratory.
Please find below calls for Virtual Mobility Grants for all three WGs.
Virtual Mobility (VM) grants
consist of a collaboration in an online setting among researchers within the COST Action, to exchange knowledge, learn new techniques, capacity building and new skills. Virtual Mobility grants support capacity building and transfer of knowledge through bilateral/multilateral collaborations; support specific / general topics that can help achieving the Action MoU objectives and deliverables; are very flexible and inclusive networking activities crucial to establish new collaborations or reinforce existing collaborations across disciplines with possible impact on career development; outcomes contribute to the visibility and impact of the COST Actions, encouraging other researchers to join. They may last from 5 to 10 working days. Applicants can be researchers (we are encouraging applications from early career researchers, doctoral students or postdoctoral researchers), innovators or other members of the COST Action DATAMIG affiliated to an institution located in a COST Full or Cooperating Member country or a COST Near Neighbor Country participating in the Action.
Up to a maximum of EUR 1500 in total can be afforded to each successful applicant (see details below).
Working Group 1
We invite submissions for VMs that suggest collaborations across DATAMIG members with one grantee per VM and at least one or more collaborators who support the grantee. The VMs are dedicated to grantees who contribute to help achieving the Action MoU objectives and deliverables:
WG1 works on an interdisciplinary inventory of concepts, methodologies, and challenges regarding the datafication of migration and border control. Next to developing a keyword approach in the context of a publication project, WG1 develops concepts, methodologies and methods that allow studying the traveling of migration and border technologies across the globe and beyond national domains and legislations. This includes the analysis of inter- and transnational political economies, regulations and policies, as well as resistances.
The following VMs help building a community around a topic of socio-economic relevance and creating an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary community of practice that encourages conceptual, methodological and methods innovation. They indicate areas of research of high relevance at the current stage of the Cost Action DATAMIG work in WG 1. We encourage candidates to apply who had previous engagements with WG 1 activities throughout the past meetings. Candidates have knowledge/experiences in research/investigations on pushbacks, the role of private actors and the ecosystem of actors and public-private partnerships, border technologies, migration and border regimes.
Theme 1: The Political Economy of Pushbacks
WG1 activities develop innovative concepts, methodologies and methods that allow studying the political economy of pushbacks by tracing the technologies, infrastructures, and commercial actors involved in illegal border violence, initially focusing on the period 2020–2022.
WG activities include: (1) systematically compiling and reviewing existing investigations and evidence on pushbacks; (2) creating a repository of products, technologies, and technical systems identified in documented pushback operations; (3) linking these technologies to companies, procurement contracts, and financial flows and mapping corporate networks profiting from border enforcement; (4) interviewing activists and experts, particularly on Lesvos, who provide contextual knowledge on the genealogy of pushback practices and their technological evolution; (5) developing selected case studies to support advocacy and accountability efforts by exposing the role of specific companies in enabling pushbacks.
| We invite submissions for:VM1: Systematically compiling and reviewing existing investigations and evidence on pushbacks in the Aegean and particularly on and around Lesvos since 2020 and particularly between 2020 and 2022VM2: Creating a repository of concrete products, technologies, and technical systems identified in documented pushback operations |
Theme 2: Mapping Technologies Of and Resistance Against the Confinement Archipelago
The aim of the WG1 subproject Mapping Technologies Of and Resistance Against the Confinement Archipelago is to build upon and further develop innovative concepts and methodologies to “follow” (Marcus 1998) the technology and the business behind the confinement of people through physical and digital technologies/ fences, while simultaneously mapping different forms of resistance to them, both from people on the move and from their solidarity networks.
The subproject will initially focus on the period 2020–2022 in Lesvos, Greece and trace the technologies, infrastructures, and commercial actors involved in the deprivation of liberty and restrictions of mobility in Lesvos, to contribute to knowledge around for-profit interests that connect the island to other sites in Europe and the Americas. Next, the subproject will trace selected confinement corporations and technologies on a global scale. Due to the vast expansion of confinement technologies and infrastructures, we employ qualitative sampling methodologies which highlight the actors that have been subject to resistance practices, enabling the exchange of practical resistance knowledge among scholars and practitioners who push for changes in regulations, policies and practices to ensure fundamental rights.
Activities will include:
1) Identifying companies and their technologies involved in the confinement of people in Lesvos based on the Legal Center Lesvos database
2) Reviewing relevant literature and civil society reports: What has already been done, investigated and produced on the confinement business of people on the move in Greece, EUrope and the Américas? We will produce an open-source bibliography, with the aim of writing a collective state of the art in 2027.
3) In which other localities do we find the corporate actors involved in Lesvos? What kind of technologies are they selling elsewhere, for which purposes and what types of populations do they involve? For example, we will trace a specific corporate entity and their technologies from Lesvos across EUrope and the Américas
4) Mapping: What kind of resistances have been enacted against these corporate actors/ confinement infrastructures, for example, strategic litigation against detention and alternatives to detention or community campaigns;
5) Developing selected case studies to support advocacy and accountability efforts by exposing the role of specific companies in the deprivation of liberty and restriction of mobility
| We invite submissions for:VM3: Identifying companies and their technologies involved in the confinement of people in Lesvos based on the database. Where are corporate actors selling these technologies elsewhere? For example, across EUrope and the Américas VM4: Literature and civil society reports’ review: What has already been done, investigated and produced on the confinement business of people on the move in Greece, EUrope and the Américas? VM5: Mapping: What kind of resistances have been enacted against those corporate actors/ confinement infrastructures, for example, strategic litigation against detention and alternatives to detention |
Theme 3: Trading technologies: Tracing private actors across multiple geographies of border control
This sub-project of the WG1 looks at the ways in which multiple geographies of migration and border control become entangled through the involvement of private sector actors. It develops conceptual frameworks and innovative methodologies to map the corporate landscape of the political economy of border control, spanning technologies such as biometric identification and recognition, cloud hosting, data analytics, or aerial intelligence, which makes visible how private actors actively transnationalize datafied border control and advance a hegemonic future vision of a tech-driven global mobility regime.
The sub-project adopts both a bird’s eye view of the global border control industrial complex by exhuming the public-private agreements, venture capital and transnational capitalist class which prop it up, as well as zooming in to a particular instance sustaining the private sector, namely trade fairs. Attending border technology trade fairs to identify and assess the political and economic leverage of private vendors is key to mapping the influence they have not only on government border control policy and regional agreements, but also consolidation in the surveillance industry market.
| We invite submissions for:VM6: Systematically compiling and reviewing existing databases on private companies, investors, procurement regimes, and infrastructural partners and identifying sources and ways to trace how venture capital and dual-use investments fuel the development of technological solutions for border control and shape the vision of what such an efficient border should look like by normalizing total surveillance.VM7: Creating a repository of border technology trade fairs across different geographies and identifying concrete “new generations” and “open architecture” technologies that shape contemporary border governance and represent paradigmatic examples of how private companies push their products as solutions for border security (and beyond), upon the premises of improved accuracy, protection, and speed. |
Working Group 2
We invite submissions for VMs that suggest collaborations across DATAMIG members with one grantee per VM and at least one or more collaborators who support the grantee. The VMs are dedicated to grantees who contribute to help achieving the Action MoU objectives and deliverables.
Working Group 2 – The Observatory is engaged in the mapping, monitoring, and critical analysis of real-world data practices and infrastructures across border zones. Over the past few years, WG2 has carried out different mapping workshops in the attempt to contribute to the collective development (D2.1) of an analytical toolkit to understand mobility and migration across European political and historical landscapes. The aim of the toolkit is to support empirical fieldwork by offering a shared structure to both researchers and stakeholders for systematically documenting and visualizing dispersed data practices and fragmented regulatory frameworks in a way that is ethically grounded and empirically robust.
Building upon previous efforts, the next deliverable concerns the production of:
(D2.3) Visual display of results of the mapping of monitoring data practices (to be made available on the website)
The visual account aims to further advance and complement WG2 work on the creation of what has been provisionally called – theData Palimpsest. Crucially, the core idea is to blend experiential fieldwork with reflective mapping to systematically document, visualize, and analyse the layered histories of temporally and spatially dispersed datafication practices and sites. The material collected through the so-called “data walks” carried out in Venice and Gorizia (2025), Brussels (2026), and Istanbul (2026) provides the empirical and methodological foundation for the visual display and will be used to contribute to its development.
In order to contribute to a collective reflection on the possibilities of mapping and cartographic practices related to migration in border spaces, as well as to consolidate previous interventions and collective engagements across different sites, WG2 invites applications for Virtual Mobility (VM) Grants. We particularly welcome candidates with experience in mapping and cartographic practices in border spaces. Furthermore, priority will be given to candidates who have previously engaged with WG2 activities during past workshops, particularly those who have participated in the so-called “data walks.” Candidates should also have experience in producing alternative documentary and visual accounts of the socio-technical dimensions of the datafication of European migration and border regimes.
We particularly encourage contributions that can help fulfil the activities related to the aforementioned deliverables (D2.1 and 2.3), making visible and strengthening a broader range of cartographic practices and approaches. Such contributions, in turn, may extend the group’s work on border spaces through the aggregation of data, representations and other forms of analytic information that is vital to understand processes of data externalization and control. In this sense, the call for VMs seeks to support collaborations and contributions that can strengthen a collective project along the following concrete activities.
| We invite submissions for:VM8: Producing chronicles or ethnographic accounts on the layered, historical, and multi-modal data practices across border zones by systematically reviewing and consolidating empirical insights from field-based experience at key transit and monitoring points. VM9: Preparing and collating coherent visual displays of the different forms and sites of datafication, consisting of images, descriptions and varied media resulting from the documentation and mapping of so-called “data walks”. |
Working Group 3
We invite submissions for VMs that suggest collaborations across DATAMIG members with one grantee per VM and at least one or more collaborators who support the grantee. The VMs are dedicated to grantees who contribute to help achieving the Action MoU objectives and deliverables:
WG3 currently works on the completion of the following deliverable:
Theme/Deliverable: D3.2 Collection of case studies and best practices of engagement with stakeholders brought together as part of the website.
The case collection has been renamed “repository of resistance” and collects diverse interventions related to different forms of resistances to datafied migration and border control regimes which DATAMIG participants have presented over the last WG 3 meetings. The repository portrays the diverse works of DATAMIG members to a wider audience via its presentation on the website. It covers a wide range of a) epistemic interventions, b) methodologies of change, c) sites of collaborative interventions and d) forms of imagining otherwise. It brings together contributions from academics, and civic actors such as NGOs and activists, journalists and lawyers, creative practitioners, artists, and educators and shows collaborations across different practices of critical and creative thinking and doing. The first edition shall be made available on the website by the end of September 2026. A second edition will follow throughout 2027.
| We invite submissions for:VM 10: an additional contribution to the repository that covers the last meetings´ theme on “the future of resistance and collaborations between academics and journalists” in Madrid; VM 11: an additional contribution to the repository that emphasizes the visual dimension of resistance to datafied migration and border control |
Application process
An amount up to EUR 1300 in total can be afforded to the grantee (for a work that takes up to 6,5 days based on a calculation of EUR 200/day). The grant is a flat-rate contribution intended to cover the time and resources invested by the grantee in virtual collaboration. It does not require receipts or expense reports.
Please note that during the VM period, neither the COST Association nor the Grant Holder may be considered as an employer. The grantees must make their own arrangements for all health, social, personal security, taxation and pension matters. All applicants must carefully read the funding rules detailed in the Annotated Rules for COST Actions and the Q&As.
All applicants must have an e-COST profile and be a member of the respective Working Group. In case you are not yet a WG member, please apply here and wait for approval. In the meanwhile, email your application (see below) and indicate that you have not been approved on e-cost yet.
The submission consists of two parts:
- online via e-COST (“my profile” > “Grant Applications” > “Start a Grant Application” > “Virtual Mobility (VM)”)
- Data entry: Basic information (grant title, amount requested, start and end date (latest end date: 30 September 2026), collaborating DATAMIG member name and institution name)
- CV uploaded to the applicant’s e-COST profile.
- Submission of additional documents via email:
- Application form (find below) indicating the goals, explaining the previous engagements and experiences within the respective WG and how they prepare the applicant to realize the deliverable
- A description/work plan, the expected outcomes and the contribution to the objectives / deliverables of the call
- Letter of confirmation from a DATAMIG working group member affiliated to a collaborating institution:
- For WG1:
>Theme 1, it is recommended to get in touch with Silvan Pollozek ([email protected]), Geoff Boyce ([email protected]) or Javier Toscano ([email protected])
> Theme 2, it is recommended to get in touch with Sara Bellezza ([email protected]), Philipp Seuferling ([email protected]), Andrés Pereira ([email protected]), or Carolina Sanchez Bow ([email protected])
- For WG1:
>Theme 3, it is recommended to get in touch with Zuzana Uhde ([email protected]) or Veronika Nagy ([email protected])
- For WG2:
> it is recommended to get in touch with Vanessa Ugolini ([email protected])
- For WG3:
> it is recommended to get in touch with Nina Amelung ([email protected])
Please email the additional documents to the responsible for VM, Prof. Vasilis Galis ([email protected]), as well as to the respective WG leaders (WG1: [email protected]; WG2: [email protected]; WG3: [email protected]).
Please submit your application by August 26.
Acceptance notifications will be sent out August 28.
VIRTUAL MOBILITY (VM) Grant
- APPLICATION FORM: This form is part of the application for a grant to visit a host organisation located in a different country than the country of affiliation. It is submitted to the COST Action MC via-e-COST. The Grant Awarding Coordinator coordinates the evaluation on behalf of the Action MC and informs the Grant Holder of the result of the evaluation for issuing the Grant Letter.
Action number:
Applicant name:
| Details of the VMTitle:Start and end date: DD/MM/YYYY to DD/MM/YYYY |
| Goals of the VM Purpose and summary of the VM. |
| (max.200 word) Applicant enters max. 200 word summary here. |
| Working Plan Description of the work to be carried out by the applicant. |
| (max.500 word) Applicant enters max. 500 word summary here. |
| Expected outputs and contribution to the COST Action DATAMIG objectives and activities (see call). Main expected results and their contribution to the progress towards the Action objectives (either research coordination and/or capacity building objectives) and deliverables.(max.500 words) Applicant enters max. 500 word summary here. |
