Borders: Materiality, Ethics and Technology

‌The Interdisciplinary Research Group on Borders: Materiality, Mobility, Ethics and Technology is led in 2013-14 by Dr. Heather Johnson, Lecturer in Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. The first year of this Group was led Dr. Michael Bourne.

‌Description of IRG

The mobility of people and things is increasingly understood as constitutive of particular social and political relationships. Mobilities are also intimately related to conflict transformation and to social justice. Human mobility manifests in challenges both confronted and manifested by refugees and internally displaced persons in conflict and post-conflict societies, and the wider securitisation of migration in Europe and beyond has resulted in tensions with prevailing discourses in human rights and social justice. The mobility of ‘things’, meanwhile, constitutes the movement and regulation of particular commodities, such as narcotics, timber, diamonds, and other natural resources through complex international networks, which can both sustain armed conflict and challenge post-conflict peacebuilding. Further, the technologies of border control are augmented by emerging technologies of bio-metrics, surveillance, and information exchange. Technology therefore shapes wider mobility regimes and the ethical dimensions of these regimes and practices are often under-explored.

This IRG will capitalise on the inter-disciplinary expertise and networks of its members to engage pro-actively with these emerging agendas. We will address two main themes:

1) How do the practices and politics of mobility reconfigure rights, security, and citizenship? This theme includes questions as diverse as how practices of mobility control for commodities are adapted to govern humans (and vice versa); how human and non-human mobilities and moorings are entangled; and how the ethics of these mobilities and their governance regimes are interrelated, and are connected to questions of law, authority and control.

2) How might the development of mobility related technologies better account for and engage with their societal and ethical implications? What is the distribution of ethical and political accountability in the development and use of new technologies and how is this evolving? We seek to reveal the productions of knowledge that connect, for example, a lone computer engineer designing the latest surveillance camera to the incarceration of an illegal migrant hundreds of miles away, or the measures to contain and control pandemic disease to the management of cross-border trade and migration.

We are happy to welcome new members to the group! If interested, please contact Heather Johnson at h.johnson@qub.ac.uk

Dr Heather Johnson

Statement of Aims

The Mobilities IRG aims to:

develop critical research about the technological practices and policies that attempt to manage mobility, including biometrics, ‘privacy by design’, and the disaggregation of borders and respatialization of security around supply chains and migration routes, and to interrogate the ethical questions these issues raise.
consolidate and expand upon networks of scholars developed in 2012-2013, particularly through the successful RCUK/DSTL funded TRUST project, towards generating greater partnership and participation that crosses the hard science and social science disciplinary divide. We will bring together academics who are critically interrogating mobilities, ethics and technology with researchers who are actively engaged with the design and production of new border technologies, including engineers and computer scientists.
enhance collaboration and partnerships with policy makers and end users who implement, manage and govern these technologies and their related practices. We hope to contribute to the generation of new shared understandings and conceptual languages that will enable deep critical engagement in the processes and implications of security and surveillance technologies.

In particular, we will:

develop and submit high quality academic publications
participate in the EU hosted workshops developing the Horizon 2020 call; develop a long-term research funding strategy; and build towards the submission of a large grant proposal to Horizon 2020 or to Global Uncertainties.
develop and nourish our existing international networks of Migration, Security and Border Studies
consolidate and expand our networks with policy-makers and practitioners who are developing, implementing or researching border technologies (particularly those established through the TRUST project), and use these networks to clarify and increase the impact of our research by engaging directly with the development of border technologies, the policy making that governs them, and their actual implementation.
To collaborate with and mentor Post-Doctoral and PhD students working in this area and to include them fully in our group

Plan of Activities

1) We will participate in developing the call for the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding call. Building upon connections established through the TRUST project, we hope to travel to Brussels to participate in consultations and preparations at the EU in developing the funding programme, which will allow us to shape and also to achieve insight into the upcoming funding priorities for the EU. This will significantly enhance our ability to successfully develop a large grant proposal.

2) We will organize a large international workshop in the fall of 2013. The workshop will have three goals:

To establish and consolidate an international network of scholars engaged in research about mobility, technology and ethics, with the intention of planning and executing collaboration in both research/publications and funding proposals
To present and workshop research papers towards publication of current research
To establish a clear schedule and program for the submission of a large, collaborative and multinational grant proposal

3) We will organize an additional workshop in the spring of 2014 to present and gather feedback on articles and reports emerging from research undertaken by the group, including the TRUST project.

4) We will provide support for the attendance of members of the IRG in the Policy and End-User Workshop being run by TRUST in London in the summer of 2014, with the goal of expanding participation and integration with policy makers and users of border technology. This will enable these networks to expand and to continue into the long term, beyond the life of the TRUST project, enhancing the impact potential of the IRG.

Biographies of Group Members - Year 2

Dr Mike Bourne is Lecturer in International Security Studies in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. His research interests include theories and practices of security, mobility and materiality, with a particular focus on illicit trafficking, arms control, and assemblage theories. See Profile

Dr Dan Bulley is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. His research interests surround international political theory, particularly international ethics and power, with a focus on hospitality and community in non-state spaces such as refugee camps and global cities. See Profile

Dr Teresa Degenhardt is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. She is interested in expanding criminological knowledge beyond the narrow confines of the state, looking at possibility and prospect of its application/disapplication in the wider international context. See Profile

Carey Doyle is a PHD research student at the Institute of Spatial and Environmental Planning, in the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering. Her research considers the spatial and identity implications of the recent influx of migrants to Northern Ireland, investigating mobilities, space, place, and disadvantage. See Profile

Dr Mark Flear is a Lecturer in Law at Queen's University Belfast and a Member of the Northern Ireland DNA Database Governance Board. His main field of interest lies in the governance of life itself, and attempts to query legal and regulatory decision-making in that area, so-called biopolitics. Within the broad field he focuses on the European and global dimensions of two substantive areas: public health and new health technologies. Work on these areas has appeared in several leading journals and the collection European Law and New Health Technologies (OUP 2013), for which he is the principal editor. He is currently completing his monograph on (under the working title) Governing Public Health (Hart forthcoming). See Profile

Dr Heather Johnson is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. Her research interests include theories and practices of migration, asylum, conflict and security, with a particular focus on questions of political agency and (non)citizenship as they play out across border spaces and in global North/South relations. See Profile

Dr Alexander Koensler is a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. He received a PhD in “Methodologies of Socio-Anthropological Research” (University of Siena 2009). Before joining Queen’s University, he held postdoctoral and teaching positions at the University of Perugia (Italy), the University of Muenster (Germany) and the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). He has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the Bedouin-state conflict in the Israeli Negev desert. His work focuses on political mobilization, non-sectarian, cross-cutting networks in Israeli-Palestinian interstitial spaces, and the role of international actors such political tourists and NGOs in conflicts. See Profile

Dr David Linton is Reader in Microwave Communications. He has over ten years industrial experience working in the design and manufacture of thick film microcircuits and surface mount PCBs for the telecommunications and automotive industries. He has published over 150 journal and conference papers. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Chartered Engineer. He is currently Deputy Director of the High Frequency Research Group in Queen’s within ECIT. His interests include microwave/RF measurements, RF component development for low cost packaging, high speed pulse sources and samplers, ultra compact antennas and non-linear device characterisation. He is currently Coordinator for the FP7 ‘HANDHOLD’ project in CBRNE detection for border security and principal investigator for the FP7 ‘BEWISER’ project on wireless and internet security. See Profile

Dr Debbie Lisle is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Cultural Studies in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. Her research interests include tourism, travel, war, violence, cross-cultural encounters, visuality, media, mobilities, materialities and assemblages. See Profile

Dr Cathal McCall is Institute Fellow in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. His key research interest is the relationship between border reconfiguration and conflict transformation within and beyond the European Union. He is currently a member of an international research consortium that has secured research funding under EU FP7. The project is entitled ‘EUBORDERSCAPES Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World. See Profile

Professor Liam O’Dowd is Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work and Director of the Centre for International Borders Research. His current research interests include border studies and divided cities in contested states. See Profile

Dr Ivor Spence is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science within ECIT. He has five years of industrial experience as a systems and software engineer for British Telecom and has research experience in the fields of domain specific languages, automated software generation, high performance and distributed computing, architecture description languages and configurable components. He is currently co-investigator on an EU FP7 Collaborative project HANDHOLD (284456) and EPSRC grant EP/J50008/1. He has been principal investigator on a number of projects funded by industry. Dr Spence has published more than 50 research papers. See Profile

Dr Tom Walker is Director of the Centre for Ethics and Senior Lecturer in Ethics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. His research interests include the ethics of policies to protect public health both within and across borders, rights of access to medical treatment, and the control of information. See Profile

Biographies of Group Members - Year 1

Dr Charles Gillan is Principal Engineer at ECIT in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests include software architectures for embedded and enterprise server systems and high performance numerical computing for computational physics and chemistry. He is co-ordinator of the FP7 Security Theme project HANDHOLD which addresses CBNRE detection at borders. See profile

Dr Katy Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. Her research interests in the field of border and security studies centre on the influence of European integration on cross-border cooperation and peace-building, particularly on the island of Ireland. See profile

Jonathan Kelly is a postgraduate research student at ECIT, investigating the use of product line techniques in the development of embedded systems. He graduated in Computer Science from Queen’s in 2012.

Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice (ISCTSJ)

Borders: Materiality, Ethics and Technology

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