
Stephan ScheelLeuphana University of Lüneburg · Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organization
Stephan Scheel
PhD
PI of the ERC-funded project "DigID - Doing Digital Identities"
About
50
Publications
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Introduction
Stephan Scheel is working as a professor for 'Political Sociology at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. In general, Stephan's research interests lie at the intersection of border and migration studies, citizenship studies, critical security studies as well as science and technology studies. Stephan has a special expertise on biometric border controls. His first research monograph on the appropriation of mobility within biometric border regimes is about to be published with Routledge.
Publications
Publications (50)
This special issue (SI) calls for reinventing the politics of knowledge production in migration studies. Academic migration research has to make knowledge production an essential part of its research agenda if it wants to remain relevant in the transnational field of migration research. A risk of marginalisation stems from three interrelated tenden...
In a growing number of destination countries state authorities have started to use various digital devices such as analysis of data captured from mobile phones to verify asylum seekers' claimed country of origin. This move has prompted some critics to claim that asylum decision-making is increasingly delegated to machines. Based on fieldwork at a r...
Since the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, various measures have been
introduced in Europe to enforce deportations. They include
detention in prison-like facilities, unannounced executions of
deportations at night-time and the scraping of legal safeguards
like medical reasons prohibiting deportations. These evidently
violent measures are justified with ala...
State authorities in Europe invest immense resources in what the EU insists on calling the ‘fight against illegal migration’. Based on ethnographic research in two German cities, this paper shows that a tough approach towards illegalised migration can only be implemented through state practices that operate at the margins of, or even cross, the bou...
In the past two decades, transnationalism has emerged as a major paradigm in migration studies. By challenging the constraints of methodological nationalism, transnational approaches aim at moving beyond nation-state-centered frameworks by emphasizing the significance of networks, connections, and practices that cut across geopolitical borders. Nev...
The introduction to the special issue (SI) lays out the agenda and key concepts of the SI ‘COVID Capitalism: The Contested Logistics of Migrant Labour Supply Chains in the Double Crisis’. The contributions to the SI focus on the reconfiguration of the means and methods of the exploitation of migrant labour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the relat...
This article develops an alternative definition of a migrant that embraces the perspective of mobility. Starting from the observation that the term ‘migrant’ has become a stigmatizing label that problematizes the mobility or the residency of people designated as such, we investigate the implications of nation-state centered conceptions of migration...
Debates are ongoing on the limits of – and possibilities for – sovereignty in the digital era. While most observers spotlight the implications of the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence/machine learning and advanced data analytics for the sovereignty of nation states, a critical yet under examined question concerns what digital inno...
This is the introduction to the special issue (SI) on 'Data Matters: The Politics and Practices of Digital Border and Migration Management'. The SI calls for a renewed investigation on how data come to matter in the government of human mobility. To this end, it invites scholars in critical border, migration and security studies to engage with and m...
The book develops a conception of data practices to analyze and interpret findings from collaborative ethnographic multisite fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary team of social science researchers as part of a five-year project, Peopling Europe: How Data Make a People. The book focuses on data practices that involve establishing and assignin...
The movement of people across borders, and the varied governmental responses to that movement, is of crucial importance to contemporary geopolitics. Agency and mobility are two central themes in these debates. This Forum makes an intervention into such debates, by contributing to the conceptualisation of agency as a co-constitutive phenomena, and s...
Digital information and identification technologies offer state authorities new means for rendering individual subjects and entire population legible. Based on fieldwork at a migrant reception centre in Berlin, this article investigates how migrants hitherto unknown to authorities are translated into re-identifiable, governable subjects with the he...
This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...
This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...
In the past decade, constructivist understandings of migration have gained momentum in migration studies. Scholars have shown how (some) people are enacted as ›migrants‹ when human mobility clashes with nation-states' claimed prerogative to control »the legitimate means of movement« (Torpey). Another body of scholarship has highlighted the crucial...
This article is concerned with the digitisation of border security and migration management. Illustrated through an encounter between a migrant and the Visa Information System (VIS)-one of the largest migration-related biometric databases worldwide-the article's first part outlines three implications of digitisation. We argue that the VIS assembles...
This article introduces desecuritization as the missing supplement of the conception of securitization as a dispersed social process. It calls for the creative development of approaches that destabilise the credibility of security professionals' claimed expert knowledge. To illustrate the potential of this approach, the article combines insights fr...
Since Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics, it has been fiercely debated-usually in highly generalized terms-how to interpret and use this concept. This article argues that these discussions need to be situated, as biopolitics have features that do not travel from one site to the next. This becomes apparent if we attend to an aspect of bio...
Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been reart...
It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying people along the lines of culture, race and ethnicity help to enact, that is bring into being, the collective identities they name. However, we know little about how categories acquire their performative powers. The contribution...
It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism
and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying
people along the lines of culture, race, and ethnicity help
to enact, that is, bring into being, the collective identities
they name. However, we know little about how categories
acquire their performative powers. The contributio...
Beck and Sznaider call for 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences doing a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European nati...
This is the author accepted manuscript of an article that is about to be published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. The paper shows that the field of migration management features a politics of expertise through which migration is enacted as a reality that can be managed because it can be precisely quantified. For instance, the Int...
Examining how migrants appropriate mobility in the context of biometric border controls, this volume mobilises new analytics and empirics in the debates about the politics of migration and provides an analytically effective and politically significant tool for the study of contemporary migration.
Drawing from the tension between the EU’s attempt t...
Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as "big data". This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods beco...
This blog post argues that innovative methods based on varying sources Big data will not solve some of the known core issues and problems of migration statistics - as it is often claimed by policy makers and data scientists. To substantiate this position the post identifies three kinds of politics that influence attempts to quantify migration: the...
The growing importance of marriage as a migration strategy has been accompanied by a problematisation and securitization of marriages between binational couples in media and policy discourse. Moreover, marriage migration has received increased scholarly attention. In this article, we propose an analytical framework for the study of marriage migrati...
The diagnosis of a migration crisis has prompted multiple processes of rebordering in Europe and beyond. These include the build-up of physical barriers like walls and fences, the tightening of asylum regimes, the expansion of biometric databases and the enrolment of authoritarian regimes in controlling Europe's borders. These developments have pro...
Spätestens seit 2015 im " langen Sommer der Migration " (Kasparek/Speer 2015) mehr als eine Millionen Menschen trotz massiv aufgerüsteter Grenzen unauthorisiert in die Europäische Union (EU) einreisten, gibt es ein starkes Interesse an Konzepten und theoretischen Ansätzen der kritischen Migrationsforschung. Auch auf der Agenda der Friedensforschung...
Although the majority of illegalised migrants in the European Union are so-called visa overstayers who enter with a Schengen visa only to become ‘illegal’ once it has expired, this mode of illegalised migration has only received scarce attention in border and migration studies so far. This article takes the introduction of biometric visa as an oppo...
This article introduces the notion of appropriation in debates on how to account for migrants’ capacity to defy restrictive border controls and migration policies. What the notion of appropriation better captures than concepts like agency or resistance is the multi-faceted and intricate intertwinement of border regimes and migratory practices. The...
This chapter uses the introduction of the Visa Information System (VIS), a vast biometric database, as an opportunity to compensate for the relative neglect of the European visa regime in border and migration studies. Inspired by the autonomy of migration approach, the chapter engages the European visa regime from migrants’ perspective to study how...
This is an online symposium in which three authors comment on an article by Noelle Bridgen that has been published in International Studies Quaterly in 2016 under the title "‘Improvised Transnationalism: Clandestine Migration at the Border of Anthropology and International Relations". It is not necessary to read this article to be able to follow th...
This article investigates the complex relationship between the practices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the field of refugee protection and the more recent political rationality of ‘migration management’ by drawing from governmentality studies. It is argued that the dissemination of UNHCR's own refugee protection di...
“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at
developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary
problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration
studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing
on a diverse set of longstanding aut...
This article forms part of the attempt to develop the concept of autonomy of migration as an approach that is no longer prone to critique of implicating a romanticisation of migration. Drawing on the example of biometric rebordering, it shows in the first part, that it becomes pertinent to address the two allegations that drive this major critique,...
This article reconsiders the concept of autonomy of migration in the context of technologically ever-more sophisticated border regimes by focusing on the case of biometric rebordering. As its name suggests, the concept of autonomy of migration’s core thesis proposes that migratory movements yield moments of autonomy in regards to any attempt to con...