Dotted Journeys

Seminar with Nina Khamsy, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. 

Over the past decades, European states have increasingly externalised and digitalised their borders through agreements with neighbouring states and the expansion of surveillance technologies. While discourses of efficiency justify this trend, these developments have generated new forms of border violence.

This talk draws on multisited ethnographic fieldwork among Afghan co-travellers in Southeastern Europe in the early 2020s. It turns to the emic notion of the noqta (point), used by my Persian-speaking interlocutors to refer to a GPS location, as an entry point to better understand the everyday lives of illegalised people on the move across European borderlands. It follows journeys punctuated by connection and disconnection, orientation and loss, visibility and opacity. Shared devices and coordinates, as well as broken batteries and smashed smartphones reveal the experience and enactment of digitalised borders from below. In following the dotted, fragmented pathways formed by people and their data as they navigate hostile landscapes and biometric borders, a vision of the fragile sociotechnical infrastructures along these routes emerges, showing how breakdowns are more than technical failures but reveal how contemporary border regimes operate in practice.

Bio

Nina Khamsy is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her work bridges digital and multimodal anthropology, critical border and migration studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Persian studies. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Lille, where she researched the mobility of Afghans in European migration regimes, and at the University of Neuchâtel, where she examined Ukrainians’ mobility to Switzerland. At Neuchâtel, she also continues to teach a master’s seminar, with great enthusiasm, on digital technologies, migration, and borders. Her current research focuses on the incarceration of young foreign nationals in Switzerland and the articulation between (digital) communication and surveillance in detention. Through collaborative and ethnographic approaches, her work explores how technologies shape im/mobility, imaginaries and bordering processes in the everyday lives of people living in legal precarity.