Enacting border security in the digital age: political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions.

Datafication, the process transforming our everyday lives into quantifiable digital data, is also transforming borders today. Data collection, exchange and interoperability have become key for EU border security. How does data enact border security in the digital age? What are the political and ethical implications of these processes of datafication? This project proposes to develop a novel interdisciplinary framework to understand how data is generated, exchanged and contested in border encounters, and to investigate the complex epistemic, practical, political and ethical implications of these transformations. Starting from a socio-material reconceptualisation of datafication as the production of data forms, flows and frictions, the project advances an innovative theorisation of the (i)epistemic effects of datafication as producing both knowledge and ignorance. It will shed light on how data forms make things intelligible or unintelligible, and how digital data flows and frictions redistribute knowledge and ignorance among border security actors, NGOs and irregular migrants. To trace the (ii)practical implications of datafication, the project will devise a multi-modal methodology for 'following the data' along the Eastern, Central and Mediterranean routes as well as the routes leading to these from Morocco, Niger and Turkey, and finally along return routes. (iii)Politically, the project investigates how data reconfigures the worlds of actors involved in the governance of border security by enacting new power relations between these actors and reshaping decision-making. Finally, the project also advances a socio-material approach to (iv)ethics to account for how data protection and the rights of both citizens and non-citizens are transformed by datafication. Through its ambitious theoretical and methodological innovations, which will shape an emergent field of research, the project will have long-lasting impact for border and security studies.