Research Areas

Biometrics, Surveillance, Migration and Displacement, Humanitarianism, (Im)mobility, Legacies of Colonialism, Ethnography, Genealogy as Method

S.’s research explores the use of biometric technology within humanitarian responses to forced displacement. As contained sites such as camps or detention centers mark an increasingly small proportion of displaced persons in need of aid, humanitarian organizations are turning to biometric registration and other forms of large-scale data collection to identify populations continuously on the move. This project asks how “displacement” is made legible as an indicator of humanitarian need in contexts where migration is marked less by encampment than by more fluid forms of mobility. Based in South Sudan, S.’s work explores how such differentiation is enacted, contested, and encoded in the technologies that mediate humanitarian population management and what forms of social life are (re-)produced in and through such practices. Their work has been supported by the Institute for International Studies, the Human Rights Center, and the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley.