November 9 & 10 from noon to 6pm each day

ALL EVENTS will be held at the Student Union in the Rincon Room and are free and open to the public

Recent theoretical work in academic circles investigate the relationship between borders, biometrics, security, and citizenship suggesting the need to better frame new ways in which borders, bodies and the state are being realigned and represented in cultural artifacts and political imaginaries. In this context, notions such as virtual borders and ‘datamigrants’ take a central role. In addition, other related projects explore the ways in which the image and the cultural representation of the migrant becomes part (or not) of national discourses of securing the State. These writings also show how this image is being rearticulated. This symposium seeks to initiate a dialogue about the above repositioning from an interdisciplinary cultural studies perspective, focusing on two main aspects: the reconfiguration of state power into new immaterial forms such as virtual and biometric borders and how this affects bodies, rights and jurisdictions, and the impact of this reconfiguration via processes of disembodiment and de-territorialization in the representation of migrant subjects and transborder communities.

Day 1: Wednesday, November 9

12:00 -1:30 pm Brown Bag with Joseph Pugliese

2:00 – 3:30 pm Panel: Transgendering the Border: The Somatechnics of Gender Normativity and Deviance: Micha Cárdenas, Toby Beauchamp, and Nick Clarkson

Bodies that do not comply with the naturalized cultural dichotomy between men and women produce interesting effects at the border. They bring into visibility the virtual body templates through which all bodies are regulated. In keeping with our “virtual bodies” theme, two presenters will be joining us via Skype. Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist whose work mixes physical and networked spaces to explore queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production; she is a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) in the School of Cinematic Arts at University of Southern California. Toby Beauchamp is UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. His work focuses on surveillance mechanisms such as identification documents and biometrics that have been deployed in relation to transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies and populations, and contextualizes these practices in long histories of bodily classification, militarization, and shifting constructions of deviance. Nick Clarkson, who will be joining us live, is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Indiana University. His dissertation research investigates the regulation of transgender bodies through U.S. passport policies as a technique for enforcing U.S. norms of gendered, sexed, and raced embodiment at national borders. The panel is moderated by Susan Stryker, a leading transgender studies scholar and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona.

4:00 – 6:00 pm Lecture: Joseph Pugliese, Macquarie University, Australia

“Biometrics’ Embodied Technologies of the Border”

The issue of the border is one of the defining concerns of biometric technologies.  Biometric technologies are preoccupied with marking, surveilling and controlling the complex topology of the threshold.  Biometric systems are technologies that govern points of entry into nations, institutions, organisations, databases and so on; as such, biometric technologies must be seen as co-constitutive of the border: they are literally technologies of the border.  Simultaneously, biometric systems are also constitutive of the individuating singularity of bodies: their disciplinary taxonomies, tacit knowledges and normative epistemologies (that is, their infrastructural caucacentrism, ableism, heteronormativity, classism and ageism) work to produce bodies that are either biometrically legible or not, bodies that are either precluded or enabled to cross the border.  Furthermore, the topology of the border is rendered, through the application of biometric technologies, as something that is at once fixed and mobile, operating well beyond the concrete reality of the border checkpoint. In this paper, I bring into focus the intersection of bodies, biometric technologies and borders in the geopolitical context of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented immigrants in order to address a number of critical biopolitical questions.

Day 2: Thursday, November 10

12:00 -1:30 pm Brown Bag with Benjamin Muller who will discuss his book, Security, Risk and the Biometric State: Governing Borders and Bodies.

2:00 – 3:30 pm Panel: Virtual Boundaries and the Biometric State

This panel will hold a discussion of the day’s theme “Virtual Boundaries and the Biometric State.” It will feature a presentation by the UA’s own BORDERS group. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Javier Duran, Associate Professor of Spanish and Border Studies, and Director of the Confluence: Center for Creative Inquiry. BORDERS is a consortium of 16 premier institutions that is dedicated to the development of innovative technologies, proficient processes, and effective policies that will help protect our Nation’s borders, foster international trade, and enhance long-term understanding of immigration determinants and dynamics. The presentation will feature a current BORDERS research project: the AVATAR kiosk. The kiosk is an interactive screening technology designed to be on the front lines of border crossings and airports. Individuals approach the AVATAR kiosk, scan their identification, answer a few simple questions and then move on. The AVATAR kiosk uses non-invasive artificial intelligence and sensor technologies to gauge suspicious behavior.

4:00 – 6:00 pm Lecture: Benjamin Muller, Western Ontario University, Canada

“Unscripted Crossings”: Borders, Biometrics, and the “Unknown Unknowns”

The reliance on biometrics and other surveillance and identification technologies in contemporary border security continues to proliferate, and with it, an increasing faith in the merits of risk (pre)assessment and the general assumption that more data equates more security. To some extent, the reliance on these technologies has attempted to “script” cross border flows in specific ways, increasingly casting suspicion on the “unscripted crossings.” These crossings that are not easily “scripted” vis-a-vis identification and surveillance technologies, enable officials to categorize the leisure traveler or the casual cross border shopper together with the human trafficker and the narcotics smuggler. The extent to which these strategies both conceal the vast problematics associated with the scripting of movement, and scripting the mobile bodies themselves, but also foster the intensified securitization and criminalization of the unscripted movement deserves serious critical reflection.