The COST-action DATAMIG (Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control), Working Group 1 “Inventory”, is hosting a 2-day hybrid open workshop on the topic of epistemology in the critical study of technology and migration regimes. We ask: What happens to knowledge-production around technology, datafication, and migration if we engage with feminist and decolonial deconstructions and rearticulations of epistemology?

Much academic knowledge production continues to be driven by epistemologies that
draw on underlying state- and Eurocentric frameworks. Considering that migration and the processes to study its dynamics are deeply entangled with colonialism and racial capitalism, in the study of technology and migration these Eurocentric frameworks become further entrenched and reproduced (Mayblin and Turner, 2020).

Technologies have long been central to movement and control. Practices of quantification and data collection played a central role in the constitution of power,governance at a distance, and the production of the ‘other’. These interact with other patriarchal and other hierarchizing views and practices around institutionalized racism, policing and surveillance (Aas, 2006; Weitzberg, 2015). The rapid increase of computational power, algorithmic innovations and commodification of data operates on colonial ruins.

In this workshop we seek to engage with the tools offered by feminist, decolonial, historical materialist and other critical scholarship for grappling with, what is often state-sanctioned, historical “colonial unknowing” (Vimalassery et al., 2016), for thinking about a world structured by technological border regimes and for political praxis to change it. In particular, feminist, Black, queer, decolonial, and historical materialist approaches that engage with coloniality allow us to recognize how unequal mobility and border violence relate to and are perhaps at once struggles against racialized capitalism, colonial dispossession and heteropatriarchal societies.

We seek to bring together critical thinkers in a two-day setting to explore, dissect and think-and-do-otherwise around epistemologies in technology and migration. The goal of the workshop is to go beyond case studies of singular border technologies, and rather gauge and advance common grounds around the question of epistemology – the theory and praxis of critical knowledge production around technological border regimes as such. Instead of a range of empirically grounded studies and traditional paper presentations, the goal of this part of the workshop is to congregate and abstract more fundamental questions around the production of knowledge, and what decolonial and feminist and historical materialist takes on epistemology mean for the range of case-based scholarship and interventions produced in the field. With the realization that decolonization is easily misused as a metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012), especially if and when it does not involve practical steps to establish change, after one day of flashlight presentations of individual research interests, the second day of the workshop will focus on collaborative outputs toward doing otherwise.