Dear Colleagues,
We would like to invite you to submit your abstracts for the panel “Classificatory Systems, Values, and Standards in the Context of Migration, Borders, and Security”, which will take place at the STS-Italia 10th Conference in Milan, June 11–13, 2025 (Panel №49). Please find the abstract below and here.
If you wish to participate in this panel, please submit an abstract (max 500 words) on the conference website by 3 February. You can find more details about the conference and submission process here: STS-Italia Call for Abstracts.
Best wishes,
Maria Volkova, University of Exeter
Silvan Pollozek, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
Paul Trauttmansdorff, Technical University of Munich
Classification systems are constitutive for migration and border regimes, the exercise of state power, the delineation of borders, and the state’s creation of “the monopoly on the means of movement” (Torpey 2000). Classification systems are not merely passive reflections of the world, but actively shape and construct it. More generally, classifying is a technoscientific practice that shapes our perception of what we deem as “good” and/or “bad” (Bowker and Star 1999). Legally codified classifications make up different forms of citizenship, distinguishing “good” from “bad” subjects, enabling different degrees of freedom to move, and endowing social and political rights. Classification systems are integral to state infrastructures and the enactment, differentiation, segmentation, and hierarchization of people. They are embedded into material objects, technological devices, and infrastructures, like databases, passports, or questionnaires. In this sense, classifications become fundamental tools through which the state exerts control, enforces boundaries, and governs “alterities” (Pelizza 2020).
Research at the intersection of STS, critical migration studies, and border/security studies has explored a variety of technologies and data infrastructures, ranging from biometrics and techniques of risk analysis and preemption to interoperable databases and AI-driven tools. Scholars have investigated the ways in which they categorize, filter, and sort people through "differential exclusion" (Mezzadra and Neilson 2020). Yet, even though classification systems and their standardization procedures are key for bureaucracy and statecraft, and for their increasingly digital forms of transandinternational governing, they have attracted relatively little attention. We therefore invite conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that explicitly explore classification in the context of borders, migration, and security. This panel is interested in contributions that discuss, e.g.,
— how classification systems are materialised and embedded within standards and infrastructures of migration control;
— how legal, technical, and political classifications intersect and operate across different domains in migration governance;
— how classificatory systems, values, and standards become transformed in the context of datafying borders and migration control;
— actors and their expertises, arenas, and practices that transform classification systems into standardized forms and techno-legal entities to become legible for state authorities and suitable to bureaucratic practices;
— the genealogies of classification systems, including their racialized and colonial roots, in the realm of borders and migration; as well as their inconsistencies, messiness and incompleteness (Bowker & Star 1999);
— everyday work of “making fit” and “tinkering,” performed by asylum case workers, officers, screeners, or bureaucrats;
— the margins of classification systems and the work of affected people to work towards or around classifications;
— how classification systems and standards racialize, vulnerabilize, discriminate, illegalize, and criminalize people;
— the silence, visibility, and invisibility of classification systems, which contribute to strategic ignorance and selective knowledge production.
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