A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Elderly Research Fellow, Refugee Research Centre, University or college of Oxford
Increasingly, technology and algorithms are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These range from biometric matching machines that evaluate iris tests and finger prints to lookup directories for asylum seekers and asylum seekers to chatbots to help people register protection circumstances. These tools are made to make that easier for the purpose of states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially numerous systems are currently slowed down because of the COVID-19 pandemic and elevating levels of pressured displacement.
Nonetheless they raise a number of human privileges concerns. Included in this are privacy worries, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or equipment errors which may lead to discriminatory outcomes. In addition they pose significant issues to migrant workers and asylum seekers, who tend to be already voiceless and prone.
Ozkul’s exploration explores the ways in which new technologies can be used to verify identities and narratives of migrant workers, allowing them to improve their asylum application method. It also discusses the ways in which these solutions can create a certain informational space around migrant workers, and how they configure the subjecthood. Next Foucault, your lover argues that such methods are both local and institutional. For example , eyes scanning algorithms can be seen seeing that an institutional technology, because they require the migrant to enter a specific location in order to be recognised; while suggestion algorithms Read More Here are commercial and global in their effects, configuring things as buyers.
As a result, that they enact a particular form of hegemonic power over displaced people. This is especially true given the current competition to the bottom in asylum policy : with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to accomplish cachette resettling and others imposing restrictive procedures that block their very own access to area and push them back into dangerous and deadly travels.
