Annalisa Pelizza is STS professor of at the University of Bologna, and visiting professor at the STePS department, University of Twente. Since 2022 she is vice president of STS Italia. Her research on “governance by data infrastructures” studies how data systems and practices can entail long-term but unnoticed transformations in modern institutions, which are often buried in technical minutiae. She has been the recipient of several European Commission grants and currently leads the “Processing Citizenship” program, funded by the European Research Council.

Abstract:
Scripts of Alterity and the co-production of knowledge and order at the European border

As the 2022 EASST conference’s theme goes, ‘critical examination of the dynamics by which knowledge and social orders are co-produced makes visible the normative agendas and corresponding rationalities that are mobilized to govern in times of collective crisis.’ Similarly, in this lecture I wish to address the co-production of knowledge about unknown populations on the move and European orders. The conceptualization of ‘scripts of alterity’ refers to intended security subjects as inscribed in data infrastructures used in the European Justice and Home Affairs area. Spanning from the ‘irregular immigrant’ to the ‘settled traveler,’ from the ‘potential perpetrator’ to the ‘long-term stayer,’ scripts of alterity reveal not so much identities of actual people on the move to, across and because of Europe, but rather European normative agendas and rationalities implicated by such enactments.
However, ‘scripts of alterity’ do not only refer to the outcome of boundary-drawing practices, i.e., typified security subjects, but also to assumptions about the users of data infrastructures for population management. This raises the question of who the users of such data infrastructures are. For sure, officers who are instructed by databases on what they must sort and consider relevant and what they are allowed or even urged to overlook. Yet databases also instruct people on the move to match their lives with the scripts of alterity, what I call ‘hindered users.’ I thus wonder whether security subjects can be considered ‘users’ of those data systems that enact them.
The answer to this question opens two analytical possibilities. The first concerns the enactment of security subjects as proper users endowed with potentialities to action vis-à-vis apparatuses. The second allows accounting for resistance not in a vacuum, but as disinscriptions from the possibilities and limitations of the scripts of alterity. Drawing on data collected at the European border, the lectures will eventually try to contribute to the debate about how to account for conflict while adopting a sociotechnical perspective.

Amade M’charek is Professor of Anthropology of Science at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, where she acts as the director of the research group Health, Care and the Body. M’charek is PI of the RaceFaceID project, an ERC-consolidator project on forensic identification and the making of face and race, and co-PI of the NWA project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. Her work has centred on the ir/relevance of race in science and society focusing on genetics and forensic practice, exploring issues of post coloniality, temporality and identity. In her research on migrant death, she has developed an interest in forensic methods for studying (post)colonial relations, circulations and extractions. She was recently awarded an ERC-advanced grant to develop this line of research in her project Vital Elements.

Abstract:
Vital Elements and Postcolonial flows: Attending to migrant death and the possibility of life.

Since 2014 more than 23.000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. They have been attended to as “border death” (Last & Spijkerboer 2014), crucially, drawing attention to the militarization of Europe’s borders and its migration policy. But what if we would make a decolonial move and cross the Mediterranean, from Europe to Africa? What if we would attend to death, not in relation to borders that kill, but in relation to life and livelihood?
The starting point for this talk is the beaches of Zarzis, a southern Tunisian harbour town, where dead bodies have been washing ashore since the mid-nineties. I ask “how did these bodies end up here?” A forensic question that I will not engage in any self-evident way. I reconfigure forensics, from an art of finding evince and closure, to an art of paying attention. A mode of opening up and articulating complex entanglements.
Inspired by forensics, its attention to materialities and temporalities as well as its tenet of following heterogeneous traces, I query the relation between death and the possibilities for life and livelihood by trailing vital elements and the relation between them. Vital elements, I suggest, are materialities that are crucial for fostering live or causing death in their absence. Think of phosphorus, salt, water, or, sea sponges. Moving with and being moved by these materialities and the way they have been part of extractivist practices, I will demonstrate how they help us to see the durability of unequal, (post)colonial relation, underscoring what can flow easily and what is being stopped between Europe and Africa. But these materialities also alert us to the fact that rather than “Europe’s migration crisis” what we are witnessing is a chronic situation of producing life and death.