Radical Participation: Why we want to make ourselves obsolete in our jobs
Walls of Ritsona Refugee Camp, 2023, Petra Molnar
Migration needs re-thinking. And more than that, this re-thinking needs participation. While tackling issues regarding the use of technology in the migration space, the Migration and Technology Monitor (MTM) builds on the expertise of professionals with lived experience – even though that entails working towards losing our own jobs.
by Petra Molnar and Florian Schmitz, on behalf of the MTM
Yes! The Migration and Technology Monitor finally has a blog.
As one of the first global organizations of its kind, we launched in 2020 to interrogate technological agendas in the migration space, with our main target to inform the public and to connect relevant stakeholders on these rapidly growing issues.
However, over the years, the heart and soul of the MTM has become our fellowship program. We now support ten professionals in mobile and occupied communities who have exceptional ideas regarding the use of technology in the migration space in both constructive and critical ways. Our goal is to keep growing and establish bridges between our colleagues-on-the-move and journalists, scholars, media, and organizations in the so-called Global North and position them an integral driving force in the discussion.
In our very first post, we want to let you know a bit about us, the ways we work at the MTM, our philosophy, and the direction that we are taking – including ceding space and redistributing recourses directly to affected communities to tell their own stories on the impacts of technologies and migration.
Stay tuned for monthly articles on issues regarding technology and migration. We have a fantastic list of guest authors (many of whom are currently on the move), who will also look at parts of the world that we mostly disregard. Subscribe to our blog and newsletter as we invite you to discover the pros and cons of technology in migration, the realities for affected communities, and the ways that surveillance and border technology is infiltrating all of our lives.
Un-Niche Migration!
Working in the migration space is a challenge. It entails witnessing (and in some instances experiencing) border violence and structural racism, as well as holding space for the massive trauma of migration and displacement. It also requires combatting misconceptions regarding people-on-the-move from host communities and the west as a whole, with migration continually politicized and weaponized from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
However, we must not think of migration as an isolated topic, but rather try to understand it as a complex set of issues that is interconnected to every aspect of society, politics, and economy. Unfortunately, we have not observed a lot of progress in the way we understand migration, instead seeing it reduced to a security threat to the established world order driven by the west.
Instead of exploring the diversity of migration as a positive, the debates and political agendas regarding migration revolve around a very one-sided take on security, feeding the narrative that we need to keep people out in order for the west to “stay safe,” positioning people-on-the-move as threats. But this framing, no matter how powerful, is a nothing but illusion, one built on dehumanization and division. As we look at the current atrocities in Gaza, Sudan, or Ukraine, as well as the growing consequences of the climate crisis that already produces displaced people, including in the west, we finally need to understand: migration is far away from being an issue that can be reduced to “Us vs Them”. We instead all need to think of ourselves as possible future people-on-the-move too.
Migration and Technology
Technology increasingly plays an important role in all our lives. From facial recognition in our cell phone cameras to robots in search engines that process our search requests to algorithms that decide what content we see on our social media channels, automation is everywhere. Big tech players use every bit of information that we willingly (or more often, unwillingly) share with them, in order to create bigger and bigger data bases that form the necessary underpinning for every AI technology.
But while AI is often hailed as the solutions to all of our complicated social problems (just see how many “AI for Good” or “Tech for Good” project you can find), the data that enables these technologies to make decisions reproduces biases based on race and gender, as well as discrimination against groups in lower economic statuses or otherwise made marginalized. Facial recognition has been shown to discriminate again racialized communities, voice recognition struggles with accents and dialects, and emotion sensors are known to misinterpret gestures and facial movements based on outdated conceptions around human behaviour.
However, while an automatic client support system of your internet provider might simply make you angry, people on the move will face different issues. From AI-powered drones and robo-dogs at the border to discriminatory visa triaging algorithms and carceral technologies like electronic ankle shackles, people-on-the-move are often at the forefront of technological development. A glitch in the system, a slight misinterpretation, or your photo and name in the wrong database can lead to huge – even lift-threatening – repercussions.
Increasing Reliance on Tech: Robo-Dogs for Us All?
Governments team up with tech giants and use borders as testing grounds, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar global border industrial complex. Under the pretense of national security, tax money finances technologies that facilitate illegal pushback operations and deportations and deprive people of their right to claim asylum, increasingly leading to loss of life. Governments that commission these technologies also share interoperable databases with opaque private partners, using people on the move to test out gadgets that will eventually also impact all our lives. For example, after the Department of Homeland Security announced the roll out of robo-dogs at the US/Mexico border in 2022, last year the New York City Police Department (NYPD) proudly shared that they are also going to be introducing these quadruped military grade machines on the street of New York, one even painted white with black spots on it like a dalmatian. “Cute.”
Border technologies do not just stay at the border – instead they bleed over into other facets of life, from robo-dogs on our streets to algorithms deciding visas and welfare, to facial recognition monitoring protesters and sports fans - we all better be paying attention.
While technology (and techno-solutionism) is on the rise, the question of who is to be held accountable for wrong decisions and how to claim your rights can be unclear. However, fundamental rights are ‘fundamental,’ precisely because they protect everybody – even though there is a pervasive and growing difference between rights on paper and rights in practice. However, as soon as we deprive certain groups of people of their rights, the universal protective system that these rights provide starts to erode for all of us.
How Can We Build a Different World – Together?
While the majority of technology has been weaponized against people on the move, technology can also be of invaluable help to communities all over the globe. But what we observe at the moment is an exponential increase in the use of technology against people.
How can we do things differently?
By centering care and the co-creation of community, at the MTM we strive to have a lasting impact on people’s lives that goes far beyond the individual—connecting the disparate threads of this vital work. Participatory design is a foundational pillar of our methodology—there is so much talking “about” affected communities rather than meaningfully shifting power dynamics and ceding space for people on the move to be the experts. From journalism to research to storytelling to policy and governance conversations, the MTM strives to firmly place people on the move in the driver’s seat—and to build some new, more transformational roads along the way!
From technological repression in Occupied Palestinian Territories to the reporting on the use of facial recognition at the US-Mexico border to build a techno-social memory archive from a refugee camp in Uganda, our colleagues in displacement are the ones who are building the MTM community at every step—and we are iteratively learning with and from them about how to better refine our participatory methodologies.
Our emphasis is on creative, responsible, and impactful ways of educating the public and empowering communities, advocates, and public officials on the human rights implications of the situations documented by the MTM, working from a decolonial and trauma-informed perspective that decenters the so-called Global North as the locus of expertise. Our collaborative project emphasizes the experiences and human rights of people crossing borders. However, we also highlight how the human rights situation of non-citizens is intimately linked to everyone’s human rights situation, no matter their migration background.
Our project is always guided by broader foundational public interest questions, such as: Whose perspectives matter when talking about innovation, and which priorities take precedence? What does critical representation and meaningful participation look like—representation that puts people’s agency first and works against asymmetries of power, knowledge, and resources? Are human rights framings enough, or do they also silence the systemic, racist, historical, and collective nature of these harms?
At the MTM we are journalists, filmmakers, data analysts, researchers, lawyers, and storytellers, all compelled to try and build a different world. Our work is slow and intentional, and it takes a while to unravel the strands of power and privilege, technologies and laws, story and memory that make up human movement across borders. We know that our concerns around technological experimentation and use will not be resolved in the short term. As such, our long-term vision is to create a sustainable initiative for the years to come.
Please follow us for monthly updates on the use of technology in migration and adjacent spaces, and learn and connect with our colleagues-on-the-move. Because ultimately, people with lived experiences of migration are the experts to interrogate both the negative impacts of technology and the creative solutions that innovation can bring to the complex stories of human movement.