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This article introduces the concept of "alterity processing" to account for the simultaneous enactment of individual "Others" and emergent European orders in the context of migration management. Alterity processing refers to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into "European-legible" identities. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy and the Hellenic Republic from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that different registration and identification procedures compete to legitimize different chains of actors, data, and metadata as more authoritative than others. Competing procedures have governance implications, as well, with some actors being included and others being excluded. Furthermore, there is evidence that—despite procedural rigidities—applicants themselves propose alternative chains of actors, data, and metadata that are more meaningful to them. In this tension, it is not only the individual Other that is enacted but also specific bureaucratic orders cutting across old and new European actors and distinctive understandings of "Europe." From a technology studies perspective, this article engages in a dialogue with the emergent debate on Hotspots, the scholarship about the infrastructural construction of Europe and political sociology.

ALessandro MOngili and Giuseppina Pellegrino (2014), Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Ecologies, Multiplicity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 380 pp., £52.99, (Hardcover), ISBN: 978-1443866552.

Data acquire meaning through circulation. Yet most approaches to high-quality data aim to flatten this stratification of meanings. In government, data quality is achieved through integrated systems of authentic registers that reduce multiple trajectories to a single, official one. These systems can be conceived of as technologies to settle "data frictions", controversies about which configurations of actors, agencies, sources and events produce more reliable data. Data frictions uncover two dimensions of data circulation: not only along the syntagmatic axis of alignment, but also along the paradigmatic axis of replacement. Drawing on empirical research investigating database integration at the Dutch land registry (Kadaster), this article aims to contribute to the theorization of digital circulation by recalling two semiotic dimensions along which circulation happens. It argues that even when complex infrastructures are implemented to discipline change, data frictions are not silenced, but displaced along the syntagmatic/paradigmatic axes

Integrating information systems (IS) has become a key goal for governments worldwide. Systems of "authentic registers," for instance, provide government agencies with information from databases acknowledged as the only legitimate sources of data. Concerns are thus arising about the risks for democratic accountability constituted by more and more integrated governmental IS. Studies call for a new research agenda that investigates the redistribution of authority and accountability entailed by interoperable IS. This article contributes to this endeavor by suggesting the "vectorial glance" as a research framework that works along two lines. First, by recovering the science and technology studies notion of "infrastructural inversion," it looks at the technical minutiae of interoperability projects as strategic sites where institutional shifts—and eventually state transformation—can become visible. Second, by defining interoperability as a performative process of boundary reordering, it opens research to the possibility that institutional identities be reconstituted along different lines. Just as vector graphics are based on paths that lead through control points without being bound to underlying pixels, so the vectorial glance runs across boundaries without implicitly assuming that they are immutable and/or a priori relevant for the analysis. This article draws on a case study observed while working at a major project of civil registers integration in Italy.

The special issue on Scripts of Security proposes to advance interdisciplinary exchanges between Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies. While performativity, enactment, and intra-action have opened important questions about the messiness of security practices and the contingency of their effects, there has been less attention to the obduracy of institutionalized agency and how continuities and asymmetries of power are reproduced, challenged, and maintained. This Special Issue proposes to revisit and rework the notion of script and the related analytical toolkit to make sense of both contingency and obduracy in the technopolitics of security. The contributions gathered here make three interventions in order to account for contemporary challenges posed by the increasing securitization of diverse sociotechnical practices. Firstly, they update, integrate, and reconfigure the notion of script and its associated toolbox to account for the specificities of security practices. Secondly, the articles revisit critical analyses of security in light of the notion of script. Finally, they show how such an updated notion of script can hold together accounts of contingency and obduracy and not jettison one at the expense of the other.

Government information system failures are filling not only newspapers but also parliamentary and administrative reports. This article deals with a case in which information and communication technologies (ICT)–related failure claimed by the media influenced the parliamentary agenda, and intra-governmental relations. Drawing on a narrative analysis of a Dutch parliamentary commission's hearings, it argues that the way the issue was initially framed by the media and then adopted, un-problematized, by Parliament steered the direction of action toward specific administrative solutions, thus shaping the landscape of possible organizational alliances. The article recommends a proactive role of parliaments in framing ICT projects.

This article empirically maps and compares types of knowledge produced about people on the move by the European border security apparatus. Exploring two complementary analytical moments, the article addresses the stabilization of power and contingent practices within such apparatuses. We argue, first, that analyzing classification schemas implemented in data systems used within the European apparatus can reveal assumptions and limitations about people on the move—what we call "scripts of alterity." Second, the comparative mapping of scripts of alterity reveals a de facto division of labor between scales of governance that would otherwise be invisible in policy. Utilizing the new Ontology Explorer software method as well as discursive analysis, we identify four scripts of alterity, which materialize relations in data systems and are thus relatively stabilized. Third, we identify as "de-inscriptions" forms of resistance specific to scripts of alterity. These can still be contested and we account for three contingent practices of de-inscription from scripts of alterity by conducting ethnographic observation of data systems' use. Finally, we summarize three contributions that the "scripts of alterity" concept makes to the science and technology studies and to the critical security studies literature on the securitization of cross-border mobility.

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic confronts society with a dilemma between (in)visibility, security, and care. While invisibility might be sought by unregistered and undocumented people, being counted and thus visible during a pandemic is a precondition of existence and care. This article asks whether and how unregistered populations like undocumented migrants should be included in statistics and other "counting" exercises devised to track virus diffusion and its impact. In particular, the paper explores how such inclusion can be just, given that for unregistered people visibility is often associated with surveillance. It also reflects on how policymaking can act upon the relationship between data, visibility, and populations in pragmatic terms. Conversing with science and technology studies and critical data studies, the paper frames the dilemma between (in)visibility and care as an issue of sociotechnical nature and identifies four criteria linked to the sociotechnical characteristics of the data infrastructure enabling visibility. It surveys "counting" initiatives targeting unregistered and undocumented populations undertaken by European countries in the aftermath of the pandemic, and illustrates the medical, economic, and social consequences of invisibility. On the basis of our analysis, we outline four scenarios that articulate the visibility/invisibility binary in novel, nuanced terms, and identify in the "de facto inclusion" scenario the best option for both migrants and the surrounding communities. Finally, we offer policy recommendations to avoid surveillance and overreach and promote instead a more just "de facto" civil inclusion of undocumented populations.