Seminar April, 8 2021 09.30 PST / 18.30 CEST / 19.30 UTC +3
The speakers bring attention to and discuss the complex web of visual, surveillance, cognitive, legal and violent practices and discourses that support surveillance and capture of certain subjects and bodies. They explore the multiple ways in which the border sees us, and the technological, political, juridical techniques used to define the scale and size of a border.
Focusing on the Aegean Sea and US/Mexico border, in this seminar we will discuss: How do sophisticated forms of monitoring and controlling give distinctive materiality to the sea and reconfigure it as a political space? How can we transition away from thinking about the border as a material or legal entity towards considering it as an active, embodied site of data accumulation or, to put it another way, how does the border see us? How are virtual border walls erected in military research and border games?
You can register for the event here.
Sibel Karadağ is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoc). She received her PhD from Koç University with the dissertation titled “Monitoring Migration, Governing Borders in the Aegean Sea: An Ethnographic Study of Practices, Subjectivities and Narratives”. Her research interests lie mainly in border studies, surveillance, mobility, humanitarianism, sovereignty, and social and political theory.
Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. He received a PhD from Yale University in 2014 and his first book, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. In addition to academic work, he contributes regularly to public debates about borders, including in the Nation, Boston Review and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Ricardo Dominguez is co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater —a group that developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in solidarity with Zapatista communities in Chiapas – and of particle group. He is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD.