Moderation: Maria Elena Indelicato (CES)

Overview

New cross-border regimes of biometrics and databasing in the EU are contributing to a conflation of the treatment of irregularity, asylum seeking, and criminality. States provide migrants’ biometric data to transnational databases that are increasingly interoperable in the area of migration and crime control, to be accessible for state-based law enforcement actors. I use the case of Eurodac – a biometric database initially developed for 'migration management' purposes – to explore the ongoing expansion of law enforcement access to the collected information for the purpose of crime control. My research addresses the problematic securitization and reconfiguration of crimmigration – and the normalisation and diversification of the figure of the “crimmigrant other” across Member States – through the expansion of cross-border flows of biometric data by law enforcement.


Bio note

Nina Amelung is sociologist and research fellow at ICS since November 2020. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Sociology of Culture, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Migration Studies. While addressing how particular social groups and wider publics are affected by different biometric database systems, she explores relations between emergent publics, matters of citizenship and biometric technologies applied in migration and crime control regimes. In her current FCT-funded project entitled “Affected (non)publics: Social and political implications of transnational biometric databases in migration and crime control (AFFECT)” Nina explores the social and political implications of growing database infrastructures – in particular their design, governance and implementation – on understanding and regulating affected public

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