The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. Join editors Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer, plus contributors for a launch event for the new book Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, which aims to expose and analyze these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
Order a copy of the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2094-resisting-borders-and-technologies-of-violence
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Speakers:
Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning books Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), among other publications.
Marwa Fatafta is a Palestinian researcher and writer who has written extensively on technology, human rights, and internet freedoms in Palestine and the wider Middle East and North Africa region. She leads the work of Access Now on digital
rights in the MENA region as the MENA Policy Manager. She is also a policy analyst at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.
J. Carlos Lara Gálvez is co-executive director at Derechos Digitales, a Latin American organization working at the intersection of human rights and digital technologies. He has experience as an analyst, instructor, and researcher on issues
related to data privacy, surveillance, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge in the digital environment.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of earth and environmental sciences and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Cofounder of many grassroots organizations including
the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is the author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press).
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Boston Review. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work
