A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Mature Research Fellow, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Increasingly, technologies and methods are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These kinds of range from biometric matching engines that evaluate iris works and finger prints to websites for asylum seekers and asylum seekers to chatbots to help people register protection cases. These tools are created to make it easier just for states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially several systems are currently slowed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and elevating levels of forced displacement.

But they raise a host of human privileges concerns. These include privacy issues, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or equipment errors that may lead to discriminatory outcomes. In addition, they pose significant https://ascella-llc.com/how-to-pace-yourself-in-online-learning/ concerns to migrant workers and refugees, who in many cases are already voiceless and inclined.

Ozkul’s study explores many ways in which new technologies can be used to verify identities and narratives of migrant workers, allowing them to improve their asylum application process. It also examines the ways through which these systems can create a particular informational space around migrants, and how they will configure their particular subjecthood. Following Foucault, she argues that such algorithms are both comarcal and institutional. For example , eye scanning methods can be seen simply because an institutional technology, as they require the migrant to a specific territory in order to be recognised; while advice algorithms are commercial and global in their results, configuring subject areas as customers.

As a result, they enact a particular form of hegemonic power above displaced persons. This is especially true presented the current competition to the bottom in asylum policy – with some countries offering bonuses like the Nansen passport to facilitate cachette resettling and others awe-inspiring restrictive packages that block their particular access to territory and push them on dangerous and deadly travels.