| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, February 7, 2024 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, This event will take place in-person at Room 208N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 |
As the emerging literature on migration studies has demonstrated, migrants who are seeking asylum around the world are increasingly finding that the process is mediated by a variety of new technologies. While the process of digitizing various aspects of migrant protection may promise improvements, new technologies also risk limiting access to asylum for migrants who are unable to overcome these new digital barriers to entry. In this talk, Professor Austin Kocher will explore the digitization of asylum by examining the context and consequences of the U.S. government’s deployment of a smartphone app called CBP One in early 2023 which suddenly became one of the main pathways for migrants to seek asylum along the U.S.–Mexico border. In doing so, this talk makes two contributions to the literature on the digitization of asylum. First, Kocher will show how CBP One, which was not initially designed for asylum seekers, morphed into a tool that took center stage in border enforcement statecraft during a period of exceptional migration policies. Second, he will examine the range of what have been referred to as “glitches” with CBP One, to demonstrate how the app created new digital barriers to asylum. Rather than accepting glitches as mere accidents, Kocher will argue that these glitches are the result of a political decision to force already vulnerable migrants to rely upon experimental technologies that hinder rather than facilitate their asylum-seeking process.
Dr. Austin Kocher is a geographer and Assistant Professor at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research institute at Syracuse University that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to study the U.S. immigration enforcement apparatus. He also has a faculty appointment in Syracuse University’s Department of Geography and he is a research fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS) at American University. He graduated from the Ohio State University in 2017 with Ph.D. in geography. His research has appeared in journals such as Antipode, American Behavioral Scientist, Territory, Politics, Governance, Societies, Georgetown Law Journal, and Journal of Latin American Geography.
The unifying thread that runs through Kocher’s research is a commitment to an ongoing interrogation and critique of immigration controls, immigrant policing, and border enforcement, as well as the development of insurgent knowledges that can resist, transform, and dismantle systems of marginalization. These commitments are grounded in research methodologies and collaborative projects that use legal case research, counter-mapping, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, qualitative interviewing and ethnography, and large data analysis to expose the inner workings of the immigration system.
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Pubic Policy, University of Toronto and the Haven: the Asylum Lab, Wilfrid Laurier University.
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