Off Spirits

A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Elderly Research Fellow, Refugee Studies Centre, School of Oxford

Increasingly, technologies and methods are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These range from biometric matching search engines that examine iris scans and fingerprints to websites for refugees and cachette to chatbots to help people register protection instances. These tools are designed to make this easier for the purpose of states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially numerous systems are currently slowed down because of the COVID-19 outbreak and elevating levels of forced displacement.

However they raise a number of human privileges concerns. Such as privacy issues, opaque decision-making, and click the potential for biases or machine errors that may lead to discriminatory outcomes. They also pose significant challenges to migrants and refugees, who are sometimes already disenfranchised and vulnerable.

Ozkul’s study explores many ways in which new technologies can be used to verify details and narratives of migrants, allowing them to increase their asylum application method. It also looks at the ways by which these solutions can create a certain informational space around migrant workers, and how they configure all their subjecthood. Pursuing Foucault, the girl argues that such algorithms are both local and institutional. For example , iris scanning methods can be seen since an institutional technology, because they require the migrant to enter a specific area in order to be accepted; while recommendation algorithms are industrial and global in their effects, configuring matters as consumers.

As a result, they will enact a particular form of hegemonic power over displaced persons. This is especially true granted the current competition to the lower part in asylum policy ~ with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to accomplish cachette resettling and others impacting restrictive packages that block their access to terrain and pressure them around dangerous and deadly excursions.