The Digital Periphery: Technology, Migration and Racial Capitalism

On this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talks to Dr. Matt Mahmoudi, who just completed his PhD in Development Studies at Cambridge University as a Jo Cox scholar of Refugee and Migration Studies. They talked about Matt’s research about how technology is affecting migrant and refugee communities in New York City and Berlin, how seemingly innocuous technology, like free WiFi kiosks, can become de facto digital borders, what racial capitalism can tell us about Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism”, and if a decolonial neo-Luddite approach to tech is possible. Plus, why New York City should ban police use of facial recognition scan. 

A rough transcript of this episode is available here.

Articles and scholars mentioned in this podcast

A post by Matt on his research on The Sociological Review, Race in the Digital Periphery: The New (Old) Politics of Refugee Representation

Books:

On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance by Cedric J. Robinson

Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space by Keller Easterling

Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class by Robin Kelley

Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto by Chellis Glendinning

The Invention of the Passport by John Torpey

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman

Two Cheers for Anarchism by James Scott

Articles

Leaked Location Data Shows Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking Users

We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State (review by John Naughton)

The Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang (review by Alina Utrata)

Podcast

Previous Anti-Dystopians podcast on gender, colonization and the limits of surveillance capitalism

More information about Amnesty’s campaign to #BanTheScan

Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-land

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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