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'The body does not lie': Identity, risk and trust in technoculture
Abstract
The article suggests that surveillance of the body is gradually becoming a major source of identification, as well as a vital element of late-modern mechanisms of social exclusion. The increasing demand for technological verification of identity is a result of intricate connections between our notions of the self, order, efficiency and security. Behind the growing acceptance of these new technologies, such as biometric passports, biometric ID cards, drug testing, and DNA databases, are fears connected to those who may have a ‘stolen identity’, are unidentified, or ‘identity-less’, such as potentially fraudulent welfare recipients, ‘identity thieves’, terrorists, immigrants and asylum seekers. However, unlike Foucault's disciplinary power, the latest technologies no longer see the body as something that needs to be trained and disciplined, but rather as a source of unprecedented accuracy and precision. Bodies become ‘coded’ and function as ‘passwords’. This form of identification is particularly relevant since its mode of operation enables identification and denial of access at-a-distance, thus fitting perfectly into the contemporary modes of disembedded global governance.
... Biometric border control is based on the assumption that biometric technologies are neutral and objective, since they are based on the biological/physiological attributes of the body. As Aas (2006) argues, they are thus tied to the notion that "bodies do not lie" (Aas 2006), but are reliable and "stable, unchanging repositor[ies] of personal information" (Magnet 2011: 2). Elsewhere we have coined the distinction between IDentity and identity as two different ways of conceptualising and treating identities . ...
... Biometric border control is based on the assumption that biometric technologies are neutral and objective, since they are based on the biological/physiological attributes of the body. As Aas (2006) argues, they are thus tied to the notion that "bodies do not lie" (Aas 2006), but are reliable and "stable, unchanging repositor[ies] of personal information" (Magnet 2011: 2). Elsewhere we have coined the distinction between IDentity and identity as two different ways of conceptualising and treating identities . ...
... Elsewhere we have coined the distinction between IDentity and identity as two different ways of conceptualising and treating identities . We define IDentities as the "rudimentary identity markers contained in biometric data" (ibídem, 2022: 4) and, as such, IDentities link individual body parts to what is perceived to be "stable objective and unambiguous thing-like identities" (Aas, 2006: 147, in Grünenberg et al., 2022 2; see also Van der Ploeg, 1999). Identity, in turn, encompasses "the complex and variable senses of personal identities as situated, experienced, lived, temporal and far from static, always in the making through social processes of interaction" (Grünenberg et al., 2022: 4). ...
As an attempt to ensure national security, there has been an increased use of biometric technologies in recent years. These involve a wide range of technologically mediated practices which format and digitalize bodily attributes such as fingerprints, iris and face, for the registration and verification of the identity of individuals. While biometrics are used in a wide range of settings and assume an increasingly important regulating role in society, their use is particularly salient in the tracking of movements and identification of migrants. Building on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this article seeks to explore the importance of- and desire for security and its entanglement with the production of identities among Somali migrants, European Union policy makers and tech developers. We are particularly interested in the various ways in which what we call biometric “IDentities” are negotiated, as borders have become ubiquitous and extend into the far corners of society. In the article, we argue that the relationship between security and biometric technologies is important for both Somali migrants, tech developers and policy makers albeit in very different ways. The practices emerging from such entanglements are all informed by contextual and sociocultural understandings and negotiations of security and identity along multiple lines. Additionally, we argue that security plays a prominent role despite these actors’ very different positions in the biometric border world.
... As a result, the datification of everyday life turns 'digital bodies' into co-founders of the individual and his or her various social relations -the so-called 'surveillant assemblages' (Haggerty, Ericson 2020). In turn, this underlines the unprecedented importance of the 'language' of biometrics, while 'talking individual becomes suspect and even unnecessary' (Aas 2006). ...
... For such an understanding, as noted by Y. N. Harari, representatives of Homo sapiens species (as an obsolete algorithm) can with a high probability turn into digital algorithms in the world-dominant paradigm of Big-Data (Harari 2017). 1 The fundamental principle of modern media is the synoptic principle -'the many watch the few' . Control in synoptic space does not involve high walls and watchtowers: objects of control themselves maintain public order and are ready to eliminate any attempt to 'break through' conventional walls. ...
In this article, the object of research interest is the phenomenon of social control and the role of digital media in the process of digital surveillance. In the first part, the authors characterise the specifics of the panoptical and postpanoptical models of social control. The second part of the article explores the specifics of modern types of surveillance provided by digital media. It is shown that digital media extremely effectively modify communication systems, determine the main vectors of socio-cultural and personal development, and are also one of the key elements of the digital control system.
... In the narratives that we examine here, bodies appear more as something to be examined for their "truth"-as speaking the truth about the individual (c.f. Aas, 2006)-sometimes in order to be optimized and surveyed for risk but also as a means to categorize and maintain (gendered, sexual and national) order. The molecules here are not only understood as malleable and changeable (for improvement or risk aversion), but also appear as stable. ...
What do tests performed on human bodies tell us? Hormones and genetics have become increasingly central to contemporary understandings of identities and kinship. In this article, narratives around hormone and genetic testing are examined through two examples: the use of DNA testing in migration control and hormone testing in sports. In the name of “fair sport” and “fair migration”, people are being tested because of regulations by the federation or by the state. Testing is said to produce better knowledge, where knowledge without testing is unreliable and defined as a problem which constitutes a risk to fair participation or belonging. In the narratives examined in this article, there is a simultaneous stabilization and destabilization of identity, gender and race. We argue for a slightly different articulation of molecularization, compared to how it has previously been conceptualized in canonized scholarly work. When considered as strategic and entangled with gender, race, and sexuality, molecularization appears as not only a development within or from biopolitics but also as a part of necropolitics. The relation between politics and molecularization is here centred on control by knowing the individual through biological tests, a form of control which we call testinaming.
... The middle-aged are invisible, and this is reflected both in the lack of research, but also in the focus on youth that is evident across society. For example, young people have long been the target and focus of much of mainstream media and commerce (Aas, 2006;Brandtzaeg, 2012;Buckingham, 2007;Hoadley et al., 2010;Skarpa and Garoufallou, 2021), a trend that has only accelerated since the advent of the internet. The evidence of this is everywhere, from the exclusive use of young people to promote and market consumer goods, to the exclusion of older people in advertising (Eisend, 2022). ...
This paper examines the ongoing work of a three-year Horizon Europe project titled ‘Social Media Narratives: Addressing Extremism in Middle Age’ (SMIDGE). The project will cover aspects of the following areas: ethical dimensions, review of the literature (including conspiracy theories, misinformation and extremism online), co-designing of quantitative surveys, stakeholder engagement through qualitative focus groups, national nuances, changing technological issues, platform use and regulations. We take this analysis as a case study template that we believe will be useful to researchers in this field and potentially policy makers, especially from a multidisciplinary and transnational perspective. The project is split into four phases; Phase 1 - Understanding the landscape, profiling content and users, Phase 2 - Understanding the ‘attractiveness’ of the narrative, Phase 3 - Creating counter narratives and Phase 4 - Guidelines and policy briefs: spreading the word. We will unpack the challenges and opportunities of this approach for social media analysis and its real-world impact on democracy. Once the initial phase is completed in year one, we will start to construct counter-narratives to combat extremism in this context. This will take the form of creating counter videos and a documentary, as well as producing a series of podcasts and webinars. Furthermore, the outputs of the empirical research will inform and feed into the development of educational and training materials, guidelines and recommendations, as well as policy briefs that can be useful to policy makers, researchers, security professionals, journalists and beyond. The outputs from the SMIDGE project will provide evidence-based content, tools and resources that will directly help to counter extremist narratives from multiple perspectives. This will enable a greater understanding of the specificities and characteristics of those in the middle-age category, specifically those aged 45-65 years, and their vulnerability to extremism online.
... Locating the body in terms of information, Irma van der Ploeg contends that the 'informatisation of the body' has emerged through the use of technology such as biometrics and digital imaging (van der Ploeg 2003, p58; Ugrina 2014). Aas (2006) claims that the present-day biometrics portray the body as a repository of precise data and incomparable reliability and fidelity is attributed to the physical bodies. As observed by Kathryn Conrad 'the data gleaned from the body has increasingly been privileged over the material body itself ' (Conrad 2009, p2). ...
The emergence of new body technologies has led to the deconstruction of a cosmetically enhanced celebrity body into a bioinformational data-self, which becomes a surveilled subject quantified through biometric proximity. Evidently, the bodies of Indian Hindi film actresses evolve into material sites for the discursive encoding, bioinformational performativity and transference of disciplining hegemonic beauty ideals. In this age of information, the celebrity capital and postdigital positionality of celebrity bodies grant their bioinformational spectacular performance with a potential biologising affect for the further corporealisation of popular body aesthetics. Drawing on the maxims of new materialisms and neoliberal subjectivities, the article seeks to decipher the entanglement between the cultural economy of Indian Hindi film stars, their enhanced biometric dynamics and biologising spectacular performativity. Indian Hindi film industry, media, tabloids, magazines, celebrity culture and aesthetic clinics situate Indian Hindi film actresses under vigilant surveillance and simulcast their cosmetic consumption and technologically enhanced bodies across the visual-online attention economy. The present study, therefore exposes the enhanced bodies and biometric dynamics of Indian Hindi film actresses as the human and non-human agentic forms of industrialised cosmetic culture and neoliberal bioconsumerism.
... Over the last few decades, it has been apparent that (b)ordering and (dis)counting are deployed ubiquitously, including on the bodies of migrants, through biometric and electronic borders (Aas, 2006;Amoore, 2006;Mbembe, 2019;Salter, 2004). To draw carceral lines between the Global Despite the threat of (b)ordering and (dis)counting to "this very culture of mobility" (Mbembe, 2020, 58), similar patterns of mobility are still practised in the Global South. ...
Within migration studies, there has been an emphasis on the economic aspects of forced migration from the countries of the Global South to the Global North. The Global North’s measurement-heavy and largely economistic perceptions of the need to migrate obscure the humanity of forced migration. Where research and development work engage with arts and culture, it typically does so to communicate findings, educate, or mediatise. This chapter considers how art and cultural works serve as methods practised daily by migrants in contexts of violent (b)ordering, (dis)counting, and survival. It opens by unpacking necropolitics of the (b)ordering and (dis)counting that are not only drawn between the here and there, the us and them, but also between the knowable and the unknowable. The intention, here, is to rebuke the creation of “death-worlds and their minions” (Schaffer, 2020) with the forms of resistance which demonstrate and persist where people are manifestly, often gloriously, alive. It then moves on to conceptualise ways of destituting these violent structures of (b)ordering and (dis)counting through artistic, poetic, and cultural work. The chapter concludes by stressing the need for cultural work mediated by arts-based research to unmask not only the humanity within the South–South migration but also the potent forces of comfort and discomfort.
... Overall, debates related to governance, power and control raise key questions: to what extent does the use of biometric and medical data technologies in humanitarian settings support a global tilt towards authoritarianism? Can these technologies become 'latemodern mechanisms of social exclusion' and control (Aas, 2006)? How can the ethics of innovation relate to humanitarian principles and 'do no harm' medical doctrine? ...
This paper assesses the influence of the humanitarian innovation agenda on the aid sector, particularly medical humanitarian actors’ increasing reliance on digital technologies. Pressure to innovate arises from the belief that technological advancements can save lives, leading to the exploration of new technologies in humanitarian contexts. However, the rapid, often uncritical, adoption of new technologies and data practices has raised ethical, political and institutional concerns. To this end, the paper surveys key debates and ethical challenges arising from the deployment of biometric and medical data technologies in humanitarian and disaster settings. To achieve this aim, it gathers issues into three major categories of enquiry: governance, power and control; justice and equity; and trust. These categories assist in conceptualising the moral and ethical tensions between technologies, data and actors in humanitarian spaces. The ongoing deployment of biometric and medical data technologies in humanitarian and disaster contexts raises significant ethical challenges that can only be addressed by practitioners and researchers together. The paper concludes with a call to jointly assess the broader implications of medical data innovations in humanitarianism, emphasising the need for further research and collaboration among different disciplines.
... A biometric image for identification, so the logic goes, does not require the text or verbatim otherwise needed to identify a person. Instead of having to analyze a narrative that may be right or wrong, the body conveys the message that 'it does not lie' (Franko Aas 2006). That there seems to be something inherently 'telling' about the body is reflected in practices of crime control that identify corporeal patterns and translate them into profiles and types. ...
The use of biometrics for the creation of visual ‘body types’ needs continued criminological engagement. This article discusses Lombroso’s practice of typing ‘born criminals’ vis-à-vis genomic phenotyping used to identify potential suspects. Both are prevalent examples of scientizing police and legal work. While Lombroso draws on anatomy to explain causes of criminal behavior, phenotyping is based on genomic and physiognomic correlation to help identify suspects. Despite these differences, both forms of visualizing bodies, we argue, are also a practice of marking. Especially in the context of crime and crime control, marking is a sensitive and political practice. Since typing is embedded in criminology, our analysis is also a critical engagement with criminology itself.
... Defiance causes slippages in the socio-body-self assemblage that reveals the extent to which bodies are unruly, difficult, metabolic infrastructures that are at once 'ours' but which in the same breath have an unaccountable, and to an extent uncontrollable, life force of their own. This is a life force that undermines any assumption of either machinic control (Featherstone 1982(Featherstone , 1999Johnston 1996;Aas 2006;Andreasson 2014;Andueza et al. 2021) or 'perfectibility' (Cetina 2005;Dworkin and Wachs 2020). Thus, despite growing pressures from consumer and media cultures to ascribe the body with a degree of plasticity, and to assert the primacy of the self over the body, the simple reality is that 'bodies… often refuse to be moulded in line with our intentions' (Schilling 2012, 221). ...
This paper foregrounds the agency of the body to explore how it is “gamified” in the pursuit of a desired self-image. Gamified bodies are those that are tricked into metabolising in ways that suit the representational aspirations of the self. The aspirations that I consider in this paper are those of muscle, and how individuals trying to build muscle pursue various metabolic tricks to try and overcome, or otherwise suppress, the in-built agency of the body. Exploring and understanding these tricks contributes to feminist understandings of the body generally, and of muscle specifically, and its unruly nonconformity to the gendered expectations of the self in/and society. I illustrate these ideas through an empirical exploration of Singapore-based body builders. I consider how they are caught within the intersecting gazes of Singapore’s socio-familial structures, (inter)national norms of gendered representation, and the agentic phenotype of Asian body sizes and musculature. By exploring how these characteristics coalesce, creating a dynamic that is constantly being negotiated through the gamified body, I advance an understanding of how muscles become imbued with illusory, rather than manifest, forms of meaning and value.
... As such, biometric technologies can force the body to communicate its validity independent of its proprietor´s willingness to do so (cf. Aas 2006). According to an interlocutor from the EDPS, this posits the security of such systems as a central concern: ...
Whilst exit operations are usually used to describe practices like forced returns or even voluntary or assisted ones, this report will explicate how other practices also need to be examined as exit governance. The report traces exit governance from the way in which the political institutions, and with them Frontex, are seeking to transform not just the operational understanding of exit policies, but also the very knowledge environment through which exit is understood by Member States and non-state actors. As such, it understands exit governance widely, as concerning both the seemingly discrete functioning of large-scale information systems and how they process and store data, over the different kinds of Frontex support and organization of return flights, to the highly controversial pushback practices. As the latter term indicates, this practice means that border authorities, or actors contracted by such authorities, seek to force migrants to exit EU territory. As such this connects to the various internal and external investigations which have faced the Frontex Agency since 2020. Part and parcel of this more expansive understanding of exit governance is also that it is connected to various markets for border control technologies and enforcement, as well as to forums where non-profit actors also seek to impact how people are sent out of EU territory. This report details the central and rapidly expanding role of the Frontex Agency in the institutional structure and political dynamics underpinning EU exit policies, and how the Agency interacts with a range of non-state actors, ranging from commercial for-profit companies to International Organizatons (IOs) and civil society organizations, such as NGOs.
... Das liegt daran, dass es nicht die Person als kommunikativer Akteur ist, die kommuniziert (wenn sich hierbei überhaupt von "Kommunikation" sprechen lässt), sondern der Körper der Person, über den Daten gewonnen werden. Obwohl Studien darauf hinweisen, dass etwa Bewegungssensoren durchaus getäuscht werden können (Alshurafa et al. 2014), wird dieser Körper in der Regel so betrachtet, als könne er nicht ‚lügen' (Aas 2006;Rouvroy 2011;Lenk 2016). Unabhängig von der tatsächlichen Akkuratheit der erhobenen Daten verfügen die aufzeichnenden Instanzen damit über ein Wissen über einzelne Körper, das mit der verbalen Beschreibung der eigenen körperlichen Zustände durch die Betroffenen selbst mindestens konkurrieren kann und zumeist als objektiver gilt. ...
... The concept highlights the point that technology always has a cultural dimension. People's identities, values, needs, and desires influence the invention, design, and usage of technologies (Aas, 2006). Hence pieces of technologies would be articulated with specific modes of thinking and values (Murphie and Potts, 2003). ...
This article examines the contemporary popularization of Tarot reading on China's prominent online video platform Bilibili. It tries to make sense of the cultural and political import of the phenomenon through the conceptual lens of techno-cultural domestication, defined as a process in which a non-native cultural artifact or practice becomes embedded in and tamed by a techno-cultural arena in a receiver country. Based on digital ethnography and textual analysis, the article presents how Chinese online Tarot diviners constructed their participatory ritual by drawing upon the symbols of Western occultism and the technological affordances of Bilibili, especially the function of danmu. However, Tarot divination was also brought in line with dominant social values and state ideologies. It ultimately became a form of 'sheer entertainment' promoting common sense ideas, an image of a good Chinese citizen, private solutions to life's challenges, and a positive social atmosphere.
... It is now widely suggested that these technologies have effectively transformed human bodies into carriers of borders (e.g. Aas 2006;Amoore 2006;van der Ploeg 2003). When the information needed to enforce borders, including information about identity, legal status or the degree of risk that a certain individual represents, is carried in bodies, border control is no longer limited to specific entry points into nation-state territories but may be carried out wherever 'risky' bodies appear, within as well as beyond state territories. ...
This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue based on the Vega symposium: 'Bounded spaces in question: X-raying the persistence of regions, territories and borders, edited by Anssi Paasi.
ABSTRACT
The distorted shape of many of today’s political borders has been widely noted. An increasingly sprawling body of literature in geography and beyond has explored the growing spatial ambiguity of borders which are now seen as both externalized and networked throughout society. There is some recognition that the spatial reconfiguration of borders to appear in locations that challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between state, border and territory may involve a temporal dimension; however, the many ways in which time and space work through each other to shape what it means to move in and out of a political community have remained largely overlooked. In order to make sense of the complex temporal and spatial entanglements involved in contemporary bordering processes, I advance an understanding of borders as devices which selectively contract and expand the distance between internal and external spaces and mobilize and immobilize migrants by altering the speed and rhythm of their movements. A focus on dynamic, fragmented and ephemeral border timespaces, in my view, offers a more nuanced account of how the cross-border movements of migrants are currently regulated.
... At the same time, algorithms are involved in fairness assessments. Decades ago, the justice system moved from narrative-based consideration of cases to prosecution that relies on ML techniques (Aas, 2006;Harcourt, 2015). For instance, algorithms are used to predict areas in need of policing, so as to automatically identify potentially criminal individuals online, or for analysis of biological or computer data acquired during prosecution (Harcourt, 2015). ...
Algorithmic fairness has been framed as a newly emerging technology that mitigates systemic discrimination in automated decision-making, providing opportunities to improve fairness in information systems (IS). However, based on a state-of-the-art literature review, we argue that fairness is an inherently social concept and that technologies for algorithmic fairness should therefore be approached through a sociotechnical lens. We advance the discourse on algorithmic fairness as a sociotechnical phenomenon. Our research objective is to embed AF in the sociotechnical view of IS. Specifically, we elaborate on why outcomes of a system that uses algorithmic means to assure fairness depends on mutual influences between technical and social structures. This perspective can generate new insights that integrate knowledge from both technical fields and social studies. Further, it spurs new directions for IS debates. We contribute as follows: First, we problematize fundamental assumptions in the current discourse on algorithmic fairness based on a systematic analysis of 310 articles. Second, we respond to these assumptions by theorizing algorithmic fairness as a sociotechnical construct. Third, we propose directions for IS researchers to enhance their impacts by pursuing a unique understanding of sociotechnical algorithmic fairness. We call for and undertake a holistic approach to AF. A sociotechnical perspective on algorithmic fairness can yield holistic solutions to systemic biases and discrimination.
... At the same time, algorithms are involved in fairness assessments. Decades ago, the justice system moved from narrative-based consideration of cases to prosecution that relies on ML techniques (Aas, 2006;Harcourt, 2015). For instance, algorithms are used to predict areas in need of policing, so as to automatically identify potentially criminal individuals online, or for analysis of biological or computer data acquired during prosecution (Harcourt, 2015). ...
Algorithmic fairness (AF) has been framed as a newly emerging technology that mitigates systemic discrimination in automated decision‐making, providing opportunities to improve fairness in information systems (IS). However, based on a state‐of‐the‐art literature review, we argue that fairness is an inherently social concept and that technologies for AF should therefore be approached through a sociotechnical lens. We advance the discourse on AF as a sociotechnical phenomenon. Our research objective is to embed AF in the sociotechnical view of IS. Specifically, we elaborate on why outcomes of a system that uses algorithmic means to assure fairness depend on mutual influences between technical and social structures. This perspective can generate new insights that integrate knowledge from both technical fields and social studies. Further, it spurs new directions for IS debates. We contribute as follows: First, we problematize fundamental assumptions in the current discourse on AF based on a systematic analysis of 310 articles. Second, we respond to these assumptions by theorizing AF as a sociotechnical construct. Third, we propose directions for IS researchers to enhance their impacts by pursuing a unique understanding of sociotechnical AF. We call for and undertake a holistic approach to AF. A sociotechnical perspective on AF can yield holistic solutions to systemic biases and discrimination.
... Nonetheless, it also becomes clear that rationales, which at first sight might be considered conflicting, namely controlling offenders and caring for the missing, are becoming increasingly embedded in shared infrastructures of control. Substantial body of literature has described how the control of mobility across borderswhether directed at migration control and/or law enforcementhas contributed to justify, implement, and normalize complex database infrastructures and increase transnational police and judicial collaboration within Europe (Aas, 2006. Two prominent examples of how DNA-led identification has been used in migration control pertain to the use of ancestry tests to determine the nationality of migrants (Abel, 2018; and the use of genetic material as a source of evidence in family reunification claims (Heinemann et al., 2015). ...
Genetic Surveillance and Crime Control presents a new empirical and conceptual framework for understanding trends of genetic surveillance in different countries in Europe and in other jurisdictions around the world. The use of DNA or genome for state-level surveillance for crime governance is becoming the norm in democratic societies. In the post-DNA, contemporary modes of criminal identification are gradually changing through the increasing expansion of transnational sharing of DNA data, along with the development of highly controversial genetic technologies that pose acute challenges to privacy and generate fears of discrimination, racism and stigmatization. Some questions that guide this book are: How is genetic surveillance in the governance of crime intertwined with society, ethics, culture, and politics? What are the views and expectations of diverse stakeholders -scientists, police agencies, and non-governmental organizations? How can social sciences research about genetic surveillance accommodate socio-cultural and historical differences, and be sensitive to specificities of post-authoritarian societies in Europe? Taking an interdisciplinary approach focused on challenges to genetic privacy, human rights and citizenship in contemporary societies , this book will be of interest to students and scholars of social studies of science and technology, sociology, criminology, law and policing, international relations and forensic sciences.
... Through the binary response of verification, the technology forces the body to communicate its validity independent of its proprietor´s willingness to do so (cf. Aas 2006). The iris-scanner thus works to rule the potentially unruly. ...
... Scholars of policing and borders have highlighted how security technologies exert performative effects on practices of control through mechanisms such as the creation of feedback loops which feed into technological solutionism (Martins and Jumbert, 2020), connotations of neutrality and teleological 'progress' (Frowd, 2020) and a reputation of infallibility when compared to humans (Franko Aas, 2006). These mechanisms are readily apparent in IOM officials' views on the nature of MIDAS. ...
This article contributes to border criminology and transnational criminal justice research into the role of transnational actors in shaping practices of global justice, punishment and control, as well as to the criminological analysis of penal technologies. I examine the performative effects of the Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) developed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and I argue that these effects are multidimensional. For beneficiary states, the deployment of MIDAS constitutes a performance of sovereign territorial power, affirming membership in the international society of (biometrically capable) states. For the IOM, the development and deployment of MIDAS and carrying out training sessions operate as pedagogical interventions legitimizing the organization as a neutral, technical expert of migration management. Finally, MIDAS itself performatively acts upon its targets, constituting ‘the migrant’ as a governable, potentially risky subject and constituting ‘migration’ as a problem amenable to depoliticized techno-solutionist interventions.
... In my interviews with the AASIG members, I repeatedly heard the claim that genetic testing would force white individuals to recognize these shared genealogies because "DNA does not lie." Yet, as Aas (2006) has signaled, the clues encoded in DNA cannot speak for themselves: translating genetic codes into social truths requires contextual knowledge, and such processes can be frustrated by historically constructed regimes of ignorance whose aim has been to produce racial schisms between people who would otherwise be understood as biological kin. While DNA admixture tests have the potential to belie myths of "racial purity," and genetic relative matches can reveal lateral biological kinship links omitted from family lore, this knowledge must be excavated and extracted against the grain of what we think we know-and what we have preferred not to know-about slavery. ...
The recent expansion of online genetic-genealogical networks has been hailed as a development that could break racial taboos in the United States by providing irrefutable evidence of the myriad historical and genetic links—many originating in slavery—connecting white and black families. These predictions are countered, however, by a scholarly literature on “white ignorance,” defined as an active historical project that works to prevent privileged groups from apprehending their links to, and positionality within, systems of racial oppression. This paper mobilizes concepts from the fields of agnotology and epistemic ethics to assess how far genetic-genealogical technologies can contribute to redressing racialized epistemic inequities between slave and slaveholder descendants, by inducing the latter to respond to the former’s kinship claims and give access to data that could help reconstruct their linked family histories. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data that foreground the experiences of African American genealogists, the study outlines the structural and affective dimensions that have converged to enable white ignorance regarding genealogies of slavery and discusses ethical and technical solutions proposed by genealogical practitioners to redress the racialized power dynamics that continue to condition access to, and public acceptance of, family history knowledge relating to slavery.
Our study illustrates how boundary mechanisms exacerbated the marginalization of paid domestic workers in India, after they resumed their employment at the end of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw upon in-depth interviews with the middle-class employers of these workers to show how the employers renegotiated boundary rules and created bubbles of safe interaction for themselves. We contribute to boundary theory by explaining how pre-existing symbolic boundaries intensify and materialize into social boundaries. Social boundaries often result in unequal access to resources, further increasing disparities. But how do these boundaries get invoked? What forms do they take? So far, we do not have enough empirical research examining the creation and maintenance of social boundaries. This study shows how social boundaries get created and stabilized within gated communities through deployment of material resources, regulations and routinization of boundary tactics. These exclusionary social boundaries are further strengthened by the presence of an external agency, emerging as a new and significant actor in the hitherto private employer–worker relationship. Finally, we note that these boundaries result in normalized differential treatment of domestic workers, thus accentuating the class divide.
Drug testing plays a key role in youth substance use treatment in Sweden. Young people treated for substance use problems are routinely required to leave urine samples, and there is often controversy between patients and staff around its relevance. Still, there is a lack of research on how young people make sense of this practice. This article contributes to this knowledge through an ANT-inspired (Actor Network Theory) analysis of how youth enact urine testing in their treatment experiences. We attempt to tease out what kind of sociomaterial object urine testing is according to youth, and how it affects their lives. The study is based on interviews with 25 previous patients (mean age 17). The analysis shows that the participants enacted urine testing as both a stable object that creates binaries in knowledge networks (use or nonuse), and as a flickering object that appears in and affects diverse drug-body-treatment assemblages (even outside the clinic). The participants had internalized the importance of leaving negative samples to get discharged and avoid adult surveillance. They described a practice that made substance use a demarcated, individual and treatable problem, and also, often contrary to their own self-understandings, devalued their ability to be honest about and regulate their conduct. Through establishing substance use as a simplified either/or phenomenon and through attributing patients with the agency to become nonusers only, urine testing appears counter-productive if treatment is to strengthen informed decision making and responsibility among soon to be adults.
Drawing on Israeli life-sentence parole hearings, we argue that release decisions are centred on the body, not the soul. The board employs a ‘medical gaze’ that dissects the paroled body by magnifying the applicant’s dying body and narrowing the gaze to evaluate the days left to live. A new risk emerges: the risk of living upon release rather than dying. The board is ambivalent when managing this risk: the body is treated with suspicion, the applicant is criticized for their bodily state and risk and populist discourses are recalled to back parole decisions. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that portrays parole as focussing on rehabilitation and risk, the construction of the paroled body to manage the risk of living amounts to denying any moral worth or possibility of personal growth.
Presenting a social science perspective on the contemporary gaze on the body of the suspect, this book considers how definitions of criminality, offenses, individual rights, and the concepts of identity and difference have been altered by changes in the biological status of the human.
Spurred by rapid developments in genetics and information technology, a number of countries, including France, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and the Netherlands, have considerably expanded their genetic databases used by the police and the criminal justice system. Whilst this makes it possible to compare DNA left at the scene of a crime with that of an individual known to the police, helping to identify individuals for the purposes of court proceedings, these innovations also raise a number of important questions, such as how the relationship between respect for the rights of individuals and the security of populations is discussed, as well as for how long this data should be retained. Genetic analysis also raises concerns related to phenotyping and “biogeographical origin” that could lead to the stigmatization of targeted groups.
Offering a comprehensively argued view on how DNA acts not only as a tracker of suspicion but also as a marker of contemporary social developments, Genetics and the Politics of Security will appeal to students and scholars, judiciary personnel, lawyers, police officers, and people with an interest in criminology and the use of genetics in the criminal justice process.
This article examines the effect Australia’s ‘Medevac’ legislation had on the way refugees were depicted by the Liberal-National Coalition and Australian Labor Party in their debate about immigration detention and border security. I argue that by enabling medical evacuations for people detained offshore, Medevac shifted debate about refugees and border security into the realm of the biomedical. I maintain this resulted in the biopolitical production of the figure of the malingering refugee, who falsifies illness to cross the border. While both parties produced this pejorative category, what distinguished them was the degree to which they believed malingering applicants could be rendered ‘known’ via the medical border. For the ALP, Medevac could recruit the purported ‘objectivity’ of biomedicine, such that malingering applicants could be identified, and border security thereby supposedly maintained. Conversely, for the LNP, no such guarantee could be established, meaning for them, Medevac rendered the border and therefore the nation vulnerable to malingering applicants. Despite their differences, I argue both parties articulated the figure of the malingering refugee for similar nationalistic purposes. Namely, to justify the violence of the Australian border protection regime, while nevertheless simultaneously depicting themselves and the nation as fundamentally ‘good’: not in spite of, but because of their harsh border policing practices. In concluding, this article considers the applicability of its analysis both to the contemporary Australian context and abroad, such as the United States and UK, where similar border protection policies and discourses have emerged.
This chapter discusses the EU’s perceptions of human movement across borders as a ‘migrant crisis’ and the policies and practices of biometric registration implemented in response to the uncertainties of such a crisis. It also explores how biometric technologies impact on lives en route. For some young Somalis, fingerprint registration is likened to an earthly Judgement Day, where your fingers will bear witness against you. For others, biometric registration like DNA testing is seen as an opportunity to have the truth told to the world. What the different views of biometric technologies have in common is the trust put in the objective truth of the coded body.KeywordsMigration crisisBiometric registrationJudgement DayCoded bodyTruth
The aim of the present chapter is to elucidate the paradoxical position of the individual legal subject in the context of human genetics. It first discusses the assumed individual “right to know” and “right not to know” about genetic susceptibilities, predispositions and risks when genetic tests exist, and assess the usual assumption according to which more information necessarily increases liberty and enhances autonomy. A second section is dedicated to the issues of confidentiality, intra-familial disclosure and familial management of genetic information. The idea is suggested that those issues challenge the fundamental liberal unit of the individual traditionally understood as a stable, unitary, embodied entity.
In this paper, we critically interrogate the registration of migrants in pan-European, large-scale biometric databases, like Eurodac (European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database). We employ the notion of “epidermal politics”, which analytically captures how human bodies – and skin in particular – become sites of identification, violent control, and contestation. Thinking through epidermal politics allows us to understand how the development of technologies that render skin visible and analysable, such as fingerprint scanners and biometric matching algorithms, are entangled in relations of power, structural racism, and subjugation. Drawing on the work of Simone Browne (2015) and her elaboration of Franz Fanon’s theory of epidermisation, we argue that migration control in Europe, and its violent and racialising effects, are embedded within data infrastructures that “stigmatise” (Van Der Ploeg 1999) post-colonial “others” with codes to control their mobilities. We unpack this argument in three stages. First, we discuss the governmental rationales that inform the use of Eurodac for the management of migration and asylum in Europe. Second, we discuss how biometric control is related to different forms of state violence, including deportation, prolonged detention, and physical violence associated with the forced registration of migrants’ fingerprints. Third, we attend to strategies employed by migrants to contest biometric control, focusing specifically on fingertip burning and mutilation, which we interpret as acts of dissent and self-determination to escape control. Overall, our goal is to emphasise the need to pay closer attention to dynamics of violence and racialisation that emerge at biometric and other kinds of “hi-tech” borders.
DNA profiling has become a culturally ubiquitous technology. Its use, whether in forensic investigations, genetic databases, biomedical research, international border-making, or popular genealogy, has been familiarized through political debates, media and cultural representations and commercialization. DNA profiling has also attracted considerable scholarly attention across this terrain. However, scant attention has been paid to the key role played by legal migration in driving DNA profiling’s initial translation from lab bench discovery to “truth machine” and identity token. Here, I discuss the first state-sponsored use of DNA profiling as a tool for establishing kinship relations among legal but racialized migrants on Britain’s borders in the mid-1980s. I argue that this early “experiment” conditioned the commercialization and future uses of the technology at and beyond border zones. Reinstating migration as the origin context for DNA profiling, and retracing the postcolonial routes by which it entered the biopolitical sphere, sheds light on the conjoined naturalization and racialization of genetic technologies of identity and identification, whether at or beyond national borders.
Criminal justice has traditionally been associated with the nation state, its legitimacy and its authority. The growing internationalisation of crime control raises crucial and complex questions about the future shape of justice and urban governance as these are experienced at local, national and international realms. The emergence of new international justice institutions such as the International Criminal Court, the greater movement of people and goods across national borders and the transfer of criminal justice policies between different jurisdictions all present novel challenges to criminal justice systems as well as our understandings of criminal justice. This volume of essays explores the implications and impact of criminal justice developments in an increasingly globalised world. It offers cutting-edge conceptual contributions from leading international commentators organised around the themes of international criminal justice institutions and practices; comparative penal policies; and international and comparative urban governance and crime control.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
Im Jahre 1548 verlässt der wohlhabende Bauer Martin Guerre sein Dorf im Languedoc, lässt Frau und Sohn, Haus und Hof zurück, und bleibt Jahre verschwunden.
This article describes the ways in which existing methods of dataveillance and big data collection have contributed to the current de-realization of Black bodies. In the present or ultramodern era, de-realization consists of datafication (i.e. digital profiling techniques and life mining strategies) in support of techno-crime control policy. The process of de-realization both de-politicizes Black identities and de-personalizes the lived experience of Blackness. In order to make explicit our thesis, section one proposes a techno-criminological theory of de-realization. The theory explains how the racialized construction of surveillance in the current age is mediated by the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology. In order to situate our overall theorizing, section two explains how Black bodies have historically been the subject of excessive and invasive forms of de-realization. This history includes slavery and visceral forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of branding), as well as political opposition to Civil Rights and volatile forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of suspicion). In the present era, the de-realization of Black bodies consists of the mass digital surveillance of social movements (i.e. bodies of activist social change), including Black Lives Matter (BLM), that are policed through the technologies of information analytics. Section three speculates on the criminological fall-out stemming from present day manifestations of de-realization. This speculation emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of digital reality construction.
This article focuses on the rave subculture of St. Petersburg in the 1990s and demonstrates how new forms of psychoactive control and resistance emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. By staying sensitive to the material and corporeal aspects of these phenomena, it contributes to the socio-material studies of drug control and emphasizes that the physical body itself should be an important venue for drug research. In doing so, we build on existing literature that discusses bodies as information resources to detect drug use and identifies resistance strategies to increasingly technological drug control measures. We advance this discussion by suggesting that the psychoactive setting of rave in post-Soviet St. Petersburg gave rise to a highly particular yet notably elusive and difficult-to-define type of corporeality. On the one hand, this corporeality could be positively interpreted as a marker of resistance and belonging on the “inside.” At the same time, it could also be employed strategically by law enforcement officers to detect and prosecute drug-consuming individuals. Moreover, we propose to view this psychoactive “rave body” as deeply embedded in its spatio-temporal context—thus accounting for the influence of time and space on the materiality of drug control and resistance. In examining these dynamics, we draw on a wide range of sources, including memoirs, press materials, early Internet archives, publicly printed interviews, photographs, and video materials.
The chapter’s central thesis is that the use of automation tools in social control and politics, erodes some of the basic concepts of the rule of law and changes the knowledge that counts as relevant for policymakers. The authors provide a historical overview of how both the theory and practice of crime and social control have relied on contemporary developments in science, be it psychology, biology, or artificial intelligence. They show how the contemporary attempts at objectification and reliance on novel emerging types of knowledge and tools—“data science”, big data, and AI—are nothing but a persistent feature of the “criminological endeavour”. Reliance on science offers those exerting social control a useful way to objectivise their goals and actions. The chapter then narrows down its focus and examines how, today, a mathematics and “data science” have come to be regarded as the most “objective” and “value-free” knowledge that can inform and legitimise interventions in social control and democratic political realm. In the last part, the chapter focuses on the domain of elections and shows how political groups have been able to rely on high-tech automation tools both online and in the real world, which has enabled them to pick their voters and not vice versa. The authors conclude that a sceptical and critical analysis of so-called intelligent solutions used in social control domain and democratic processes, such as elections, is required lest we risk further disintegration of fundamental cornerstones of liberal democracies.
English After the Foucauldian model, often misunderstood and projected without nuance onto the present, the study of social control has not progressed much. Meanwhile, changes on the ground call for the construction of a new theoretical paradigm which should take account of three contemporary tendencies: a) the embedding of control in the widespread and often consensual interaction between the user and the outlets and systems of institutional action; b) the emergence of an ‘unintended control’, that is not oriented towards values; and, c) the inherent contribution of sociotechnical systems, which at once regularise social behaviour and project onto their users a consciousness formed around invisible, yet ubiquitous, threats. The paper proposes to understand these tendencies as part of the contemporary transition towards institutional normativity and institutional sociality, two concepts that the author has developed in other works. Français Après le modèle foucaldien, souvent mal compris et projeté sans nuance sur le présent, le débat sur le contrôle social n'est pas en forte progression. Cependant, les évolutions sur le terrain appellent à la structuration d'un nouveau cadre théorique qui tient compte de trois tendances contemporaines : a) l'enchâssement du contrôle dans l'interaction large, et souvent agréable, de l'usager avec les institutions et les organisations, b) l'émergence d'un "contrôle involontaire", dépourvu de l’intention d’appliquer des valeurs c) l'apport inhérent de systèmes sociotechniques qui à la fois, régularisent les comportements sociaux et projettent sur leurs usagers un consentement formé autour de menaces invisibles mais ubiquistes. Il est proposé de comprendre ces tendances comme partie de la transition contemporaine vers une « socialité institutionnelle », analysée par l’auteur dans d’autres travaux.
After the Foucauldian model, often misunderstood and projected without nuance onto the present, the study of social control has not progressed much. Meanwhile, changes on the ground call for the construction of a new theoretical paradigm which should take account of three contemporary tendencies: a) the embedding of control in the widespread and often consensual interaction between the user and the outlets and systems of institutional action; b) the emergence of an 'unintended control', that is not oriented towards values; and, c) the inherent contribution of sociotechnical systems, which at once regularise social behaviour and project onto their users a consciousness formed around invisible, yet ubiquitous, threats. The paper proposes to understand these tendencies as part of the contemporary transition towards institutional normativity and institutional sociality, two concepts that the author has developed in other works.
This article considers the impact of the new biological criminology on control strategies. Biocriminology does not purport to have a general explanation for crime, but draws upon contemporary human genetics and neurobiology to account for what is represented as a growing social problem of violent and anti-social conduct. Jurisprudential notions of free will and responsibility are not being displaced by genetic essentialism in the courtroom, where the tendency is for an increased emphasis upon moral responsibility of all offenders for their actions. However, in other areas of the criminal justice system, we are seeing the emergence of new conceptions of the individual `genetically at risk' of offending, and the development of crime prevention strategies based upon a rationale of public health. This is not a new eugenics, but a control strategy that aims to identify, treat and control individuals predisposed to impulsive or aggressive conduct. The implications of the new biological criminology may be seen in the form of genetic discrimination, genetic screening in risk assessments and the use of quasi-consensual `treatment' for supposed biological tendencies, as conditions for a non-custodial sentence, loss of employment or denial of insurance or other benefits. The search for biological dispositions may also play a part in the increased use of preventive detention and other pre-emptive interventions for `the protection of the public' against those whose conduct seems to show wanton disregard for the moral constraints on the conduct of free individuals in a liberal society.
This paper considers the implications of the rise of the new molecular genetics for the ways in which we are governed and the ways in which we govern ourselves. Using examples of genetic screening and genetic discrimination in education, employment and insurance, and a case study of debates among those at risk of developing Hunt-ington's Disease and their relatives, we suggest that some of the claims made by critics of these new developments are misplaced. While there are possibilities of genetic dis-crimination, the key event is the creation of the person 'genetically at risk'. But genetic risk does not imply resignation in the face of an implacable biological destiny: it induces new and active relations to oneself and one's future. In particular, it gener-ates new forms of 'genetic responsibility', locating actually and potentially affected individuals within new communities of obligation and identi cation. Far from gener-ating fatalism, the rewriting of personhood at a genetic level and its visualization through a 'molecular optic' transforms the relations between patient and expert in unexpected ways, and is linked to the development of novel 'life strategies', involving practices of choice, enterprise, self-actualization and prudence in relation to one's genetic make-up. Most generally, we suggest, the birth of the person 'genetically at risk' is part of a wider reshaping of personhood along somatic lines and a mutation in conceptions of life itself.
After Durkheim and after Foucault the idea of deviance from the community's norms has been the central principle for explaining definitions of crime and justification of punishment. Deviance has become a backwards definition of normality, and culture effectively bans unacceptable behaviour. Deviance is a form of dysfunction, punishment is part of the return route to rationality. In Foucault's conception punishment is not retributive or retaliatory, but the cultural reconstruction of the subject. Though the most modern critique of society does not go beyond Foucault, the processes of late modernity have made this whole approach invalid. The boundary between normal and deviant has largely been erased. Deviance can no longer be treated as marginalized behaviour of marginalized persons. And yet, something recognized as ‘crime’ is a live issue, crime endangers the citizens and risk of crime takes centre stage, objectified along with other risks. The scale of necessary rethinking of the relation of crime to society can only be sketched in this article. Risk, not crime, has become the central culture register of social interaction. Connecting later modernity and risk opens new spaces for sociological theory. Media and politicians insist on the advent of a newly dangerous, uncertain world, associated with environmental problems and to technologies which produce them, chemical, nuclear and biotechnical. The analysis is always from inside the culture, the risks are objectified, risk itself is not regarded as a socio-cultural product. The engineer's specialized professional perception of risk as an object-to-object category is now being replaced by a society-to-object notion. The critique brought by cultural theory is that risk, like crime, is essentially a society-to-society product. The idea of ‘dangerization’ is useful to introduce the idea that sensibility to threat is built by cultural means. By a circular process of amplification the consciousness of a dangerous society enhances that of a dangerous material world. Risk is a projection to the present through the future. Without a hypothesized future, risk cannot be established. But according to cultural theory such a hypothesis of the future can never be a ‘neutral prediction’. It sees such predictions as attempts to manage collective patterns of fear which follow lines of social stratification. The liberal vision of equality before the law is neutralized by assigning dangerousness to specific social identities. Belonging to a particular social group establishes or excludes the sense of threat and disarms or arms segregating avoidance strategies. Society is more deeply divided than ever on principles of security-seeking. The probability of victimization is at the centre of segregation. Systems, strategies and tactics based on suspicion, backed by probability, produce rearrangements of population on the basis of secure and non-secure areas. Means and times of transport are chosen on the same basis, and there is no later modern space without consciousness of dangerousness. The argument here must turn to the changes in the social bond which have followed from changes in the technology of communication. It helps the case to present a view of society as a system of permissions to access. The turnstile, the credit card and the password can be taken to represent a process which has put all access on to an automated basis. The need to build up relations of trust is reduced, almost eliminated. Either the card giving access to money or information is technically valid, or it is not. Social control is taken out of interpersonal interaction and handed over to an automated basis. No more need for negotiation of personal ties, no need for polished social skills, no need to demonstrate ethical probity, the new social divisions are defined by having or not having the right mechanical means of identification at each level. Automated access replaces personal trust. The effect is to further weaken neighbourhood ties where co-residents do not need to relate to one another at all and atomization of kinship units is complete. In the dangerized society ethical evaluation is irrelevant, or at best deflected on to safety concerns. What can deviance theory do? Deviating from what? Where are the norms? The response to anomie is a danger-aware culture, where all the other classifications have gone and all that is left in the way of structure is in automated systems: instead of social distinction, the much cruder indicators: gender and age give signals of dangerous identities. Deviance can still be defined by exclusion from card-holding. Crime can be divided into fear-provoking and non fear-provoking. Social institutions denuded of moral responsibility are mere distribution systems. The ethics of consumerism take command. The evaluation of objects and persons focuses on safety, and the producer's responsibility for selling safe products is the criterion for good government.
Drug testing has become the norm in many workplaces. In order to get a job, potential employees are required to provide their urine for testing. Pissing on Demandexamines this phenomenon along with the resulting rise of the anti-drug testing movement, or the "detox industry," that works to beat these tests. Strategies include over-the-counter products like "body flushers" that sound innocent but are really designed to mask the presence of illegal drugs to kits advertised in pro-drug publications like High Timesthat make no bones about their real purpose. The first expose of the detox industry in all its manifestations, this book is required reading for anyone concerned with social control, privacy, and workers' rights.
The article traces the main themes of the 'governmentality' literature, as developed by Michel Foucault and subsequent writers, and outlines a series of related ideas about 'the social' as a realm of government; statistics and bio-power; actuarial forms of reasoning; and government-at-a-distance. It goes on to illustrate the criminological value of these ideas by means of an analysis of some of the governmental rationalities and technologies that are currently emerging in the field of crime control. These include 'economic' forms of reasoning about crime and its control, the emergence of 'the criminogenic situation' as a practicable object of government and the use of 'technologies of the self' in penal settings. The final part of the article identifies some of the limitations and problems of the 'governmentality' literature. It argues that studies of governmentality beg certain sociological questions; that the governmentality analytic is quite compatible with certain forms of sociological analysis; and that the project of writing a history of the present is best pursued - in the field of crime control at least -by combining these forms of enquiry.
This article develops a theoretical model of `digital rule'. This is a form of at-a-distance monitoring which becomes possible with the advent of certain electronic technologies. It is argued that this form of monitoring gives rise to a related form of decision-making, and to particular forms of punishment, both directly and indirectly. The article begins with a review of Foucault's work on `discipline'. It is argued that while his general approach remains useful, his `technology of power' model requires updating, because of certain moves within many criminal justice systems away from reliance on the disciplinary techniques Foucault associates with modernity. I argue that comments by Deleuze suggest a way of developing a theoretical adjunct to Foucault's model, and this new control form I characterize as one of `digital rule'. Various emerging electronic technologies are examined, and it is shown how they operate specifically through restrictions specified in terms of time and space. The relationship between formal control, exclusion and punishment measures is considered, and it is concluded that in this emerging form of rule, these aspects continue to have a very close relationship, manifest here in a particular new way.
This article attempts to think citizenship politics in the international security context of a post-September 11th world. Considering specifically the introduction of biometric technologies, the article reveals the extent to which contemporary citizenship is securitized as a part of the wider post-September 11th securitization of the inside'. This securitization contributes directly to the intensification of conventional citizenship practice, as biometric technologies are employed to conceal and advance the heightened exclusionary and restrictive practices of contemporary securitized citizenship. The intensified restriction and preservation of particular rights and entitlements, vis-à-vis the application of biometric technologies, serves both private and public concerns over 'securing identity'. This overall move, and the subsequent challenges to conventional notions of citizenship politics and agency, is referred to here as 'identity management'. To then ask 'What's left of citizenship?' sheds light on these highly political transformations, as the restricted aspects of citizenship-that is, its continued obsession with the preservation and regulation/restriction of specific rights and entitlements-are increased, and the instrument of this escalation, biometrics, dramatically alters existing notions of political agency and 'citizenship/asylum politics'.
From the Publisher:
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.
Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."
Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.
Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
Fifty years ago, in 1984, George Orwell imagined a future in which privacy was demolished by a totalitarian state that used spies, video surveillance, historical revisionism, and control over the media to maintain its power. Those who worry about personal privacy and identity--especially in this day of technologies that encroach upon these rights--still use Orwell's "Big Brother" language to discuss privacy issues. But the reality is that the age of a monolithic Big Brother is over. And yet the threats are perhaps even more likely to destroy the rights we've assumed were ours. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century shows how, in these early years of the 21st century, advances in technology endanger our privacy in ways never before imagined. Direct marketers and retailers track our every purchase; surveillance cameras observe our movements; mobile phones will soon report our location to those who want to track us; government eavesdroppers listen in on private communications; misused medical records turn our bodies and our histories against us; and linked databases assemble detailed consumer profiles used to predict and influence our behavior. Privacy--the most basic of our civil rights--is in grave peril. Simson Garfinkel--journalist, entrepreneur, and international authority on computer security--has devoted his career to testing new technologies and warning about their implications. This newly revised update of the popular hardcover edition of Database Nation is his compelling account of how invasive technologies will affect our lives in the coming years. It's a timely, far-reaching, entertaining, and thought-provoking look at the serious threats to privacy facing us today. The book poses a disturbing question: how can we protect our basic rights to privacy, identity, and autonomy when technology is making invasion and control easier than ever before? Garfinkel's captivating blend of journalism, storytelling, and futurism is a call to arms. It will frighten, entertain, and ultimately convince us that we must take action now to protect our privacy and identity before it's too late.
Although criticized as potentially invasive, profiling has recently been promoted as a means for finding potential terrorists, and particularly airplane hijackers. Based upon sophisticated data-mining technologies, new forms of profiling have seemed, whatever the privacy issues that they raise, to offer more objective alternatives to earlier airline profiling systems, which appear to have been based on nothing more than a sense that certain groups of people are not proper passengers, that they are out of place on an airplane. But in fact, the example of geodemographic systems suggests that an inevitable element of profiling is the appeal to sets of simple narratives. Indeed, far from being merely expository devices, such narratives are central to the profile's analytical structure; as a consequence, while their promoters laud the profiling systems as neutral analytical devices, embedded within them is a sorting system that might more accurately be described as encoding an unstable world of Foucauldian similitudes.
Biometrics is often described as `the next big thingin information technology'. Rather than IT renderingthe body irrelevant to identity – a mistaken idea tobegin with – the coupling of biometrics with ITunequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is howbodies will become related to identity, and what thenormative and political ramifications of this couplingwill be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in thebiomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces andcharacteristics into digital codes and ciphers to be`read' by a machine. ``Your iris is read, in the sameway that your voice can be printed, and yourfingerprint can be read'', by computers that, in turn,have become ``touch-sensitive'', and endowed with seeingand hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable``text'', the meaning and significance of the biometricbody will be contingent upon ``context'', and therelations established with other ``texts''. Thesemetaphors open up ways to investigate the differentmeanings that will become attached to the biometricbody and the ways in which it will be tied toidentity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans andpractices surrounding the `Eurodac' project, aEuropean Union initiative to use biometrics (specif.fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration andborder crossings by asylum seekers.
Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive ...
I have read in the newspapers that foreign citizens, when travelling to the United States on a Visa, will undergo a data registration and have their fingerprints taken. Not willing to submit myself to this treatment, I decided therefore to cancel my guest lectures at New York University for March 2004. At this time, I would like to provide reasons for my decision – a decision that I find necessary and unavoidable in spite of my sympathies for American students and professors with whom I have for many years felt connected both in friendship and professional life. This is a decision that I would hope to be adopted also by other European Intellectuals and Teachers.
"The DNA Mystique is a wake-up call to all who would dismiss America's love affair with 'the gene' as a merely eccentric obsession." --In These Times "Nelkin and Lindee are to be warmly congratulated for opening up this intriguing field [of genetics in popular culture] to further study." --Nature The DNA Mystique suggests that the gene in popular culture draws on scientific ideas but is not constrained by the technical definition of the gene as a section of DNA that codes for a protein. In highlighting DNA as it appears in soap operas, comic books, advertising, and other expressions of mass culture, the authors propose that these domains provide critical insights into science itself. With a new introduction and conclusion, this edition will continue to be an engaging, accessible, and provocative text for the sociology, anthropology, and bioethics classroom, as well as stimulating reading for those generally interested in science and culture.
Despite the enormous influence of Michel Foucault in gender studies, social theory, and cultural studies, his work has been relatively neglected in the study of politics. Although he never published a book on the state, in the late 1970s Foucault examined the technologies of power used to regulate society and the ingenious recasting of power and agency that he saw as both consequence and condition of their operation. These twelve essays provide a critical introduction to Foucault's work on politics, exploring its relevance to past and current thinking about liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Moving away from the great texts of liberal political philosophy, this book looks closely at the technical means with which the ideals of liberal political rationalities have been put into practice in such areas as schools, welfare, and the insurance industry. This fresh approach to one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century is essential reading for anyone interested in social and cultural theory, sociology, and politics.
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
Tjenestemennene støtter huuse
- Aftenposten
Aftenposten (2003) 'Tjenestemennene støtter huuse', 25 June.
Viser fingeren: får adgang
- Aftenposten
Aftenposten (2006) 'Viser fingeren: får adgang', 30 January.
Personvern i faresonen. Oslo: Cappelen
- Jon Bing
Bing, Jon (1991) Personvern i faresonen. Oslo: Cappelen.
NSW Police Eye Roadside Fingerprint Biometrics
Computerworld (2005) 'NSW Police Eye Roadside Fingerprint Biometrics', 14 October. Available at:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/
Nå kommer “superpasset”
- Dagsavisen
Dagsavisen (2003) 'Nå kommer "superpasset"', 7 July.
U.N. Afghan Aid Program Goes "Eye" Tech
- Anthony Giddens
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Globe and Mail (2003) 'U.N. Afghan Aid Program Goes "Eye" Tech', 20 March.
Gould, Stephen J. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.
Guardian (2002) 'Codes for Conduct', 21 September.
Guardian (2004) 'IT News', 27 May.
Guardian Weekly (2003) 'Uproar over Sloppy DNA Tests in Houston', 20 March.
- Scott Lash
Lash, Scott (2002) Critique of Information. London: SAGE Publications.
Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life
- David Lyon
Lyon, David (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Maidenhead: Open University
Press.
Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies
- David Lyon
Lyon, David (2003) 'Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies', in D. Lyon
(ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, pp. 13-30. London:
Routledge.
Surveillance Creep in the Genetic Age
- Dorothy Nelkin
- Lori Andrews
Nelkin, Dorothy and Lori Andrews (2003) 'Surveillance Creep in the Genetic Age', in D. Lyon (ed.)
Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, pp. 94-110. London:
Routledge.
Disciplining Punishment: The Re-form of Sentencing
- Jonathan Simon
Simon, Jonathan (1995) Disciplining Punishment: The Re-form of Sentencing. Unpublished
manuscript.
Electronic Identity Cards and Social Classification
- Felix Stalder
- David Lyon
Stalder, Felix and David Lyon (2003) 'Electronic Identity Cards and Social Classification', in D. Lyon
(ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, pp. 77-93. London:
Routledge.
Special Issue on 'War, Crime and Human Rights
Theoretical Criminology (2003) Special Issue on 'War, Crime and Human Rights', 7(3).
Biometrics and the Body as Information: Normative Issues of the Socio-technical Coding of the Body
- Ploeg Van Der
van der Ploeg, Irma (2003) 'Biometrics and the Body as Information: Normative Issues of the
Socio-technical Coding of the Body', in D. Lyon (ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk
and Digital Discrimination, pp. 57-73. London: Routledge.