Seminar of the project Exchange with Sanja Milivojevic

The Seminar of the project Exchange “Rethinking ‘Stealing the fire, 2.0 style’. Furthering our engagement with counter-security technologies in 21st century”, with Sanja Milivojevic, will be held on May 27th, at 2:30 p.m., in the Education Auditorium.

Policing global mobility within information space and the use of technology in mobility control have been subjects of academic inquiry for quite some time. Scholars mostly ventured into this area of academic inquiry to document the use of technology to observe and control mobile populations. Rarely did academic attention focus on the use of technology as a site of resistance and/or social change (Newell et al. 2016; for notable exceptions see Gillespie et al. 2016; Rovisco 2015). In this presentation, Sanja Milivojevic would like to revisit and further some key premises from my paper published in Theoretical Criminology in 2018 (Milivojevic 2018). In the paper, she investigated how the ‘digital’ transforms borders from below and how technology can serve not only as mobility enabler, but also a tool for de-securitization and re-humanization of illegalized non-citizens. She argued that border crossers reclaim technology and in so doing successfully secure safe passage, record abusive bordering practices, and create counternarratives of migration by challenging an account of a ‘dangerous migrant’ (effectively deploying what I call ‘counter-security technologies’). In the context of irregular migration, Sanja Milivojevic contends, this process largely occurs on existing technological platforms, such as social media and smartphone technology. In this presentation, however, she would like to test some of these premises, but also further her analysis on the role technology can and should play in desecuritization of migration. Sanja Milivojevic will focus on the upcoming technology for ‘the good’ (for example, virtual and augmented reality, apps developed by border crossers themselves and the Internet of Things). The presentation will also reflect on the role of research and why we need to focus on counter-security technologies in the Global North, but also the Global South.

Sanja Milivojevic is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at La Trobe, Melbourne. Sanja holds LL.B and LL.M from Belgrade University’s Law School, and Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia. Sanja’s research interests are borders and mobility, security technologies, surveillance and crime, gender and victimization, and international criminal justice and human rights. She is Associate Director of Border Criminologies at Oxford University and editorial board member for journal Temida (Serbia). Sanja has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, University of Oslo, University of Belgrade and the University of Zagreb, as well as a Public Interest Law Fellow at Columbia University’s Law School. She has participated in over 30 international and domestic conferences and publishes in English and Serbian. Sanja’s latest book Border Policing and Security Technologies is published in 2019 (Routledge).

[Posted: 15-04-2019]