Friday, September 12,
The Lab, Cultural Institute Google
8 rue de Londres, 75009, Paris

A Conference-performance that questions the interactions between artists and scientists around the data dramatization:

Roger Malina, astrophysicist and founder of the ArtSciLab (Texas University – Dallas)

Andrew Blanton, composer, media artist / UT Dallas ArtSci Lab

Tommaso Venturini, research coordinator / Medialab Sciences-Po, Paris

Isabelle Arvers, author, media art curator / antiAtlas

Isabelle Arvers will realise a conference -performance with the system WJ-S and will present the net.art and video content of the platform antiAtlas.

January 27 & 28, 2014
La Compagnie, Marseille
Maison des Astronomes
IMéRA (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research), Marseille

Topology is a branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of objects that are not changed under certain deformations of their shape. Social scientists have been inspired by topology in trying to understand the nature of territorial changes introduced by globalization. However, the relationship between topology and territory is not straightforward, as the former deals primarily with mathematical properties of space while the latter deals primarily with the social aspects of space. This workshop brings together scholars to engage these issues.

Monday, January 27, 2013

La Compagnie, 19 rue Francis de Pressensé, 13001 Marseille

Lauren Martin, Geographer, University of Oulu, Finland
Border Topologies: Law, Territory, and Bodies in US Immigration Enforcement

Christophe Sohn, Geographer, Public Research Center, CEPS, Luxembourg
The border assemblage: A relational approach to bordering

Gabriel Popescu, Geographer, Indiana University & IMeRA
The topological imagination: Territorializing mobile borders?

Alessandro Petti, Architect, Decolonizing Architecture Project, Palestine
Lawless lines

Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Geographer, University of Grenoble, France
The mobile border hypothesis

Stephanie Simon, Geographer, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Border temporalities: The space-time topology of interoperability and situational awareness

Charles Heller (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London/ Watch The Med project)
The Topology of the EU’s Maritime Frontier

Tuesday, January 28

Maison des Astronomes, IMéRA (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research), Marseille

9:00 – 13:00 Closed door discussion on topology issues

Abstracts

Lauren Martin, Geographer, University of Oulu, Finland
Migration, Law, and Territory: A Topological Approach to Borders

In this talk, I will critically engage with the concept of topological borders, an increasingly cited but under-examined aspect of contemporary mobility control regimes. Borders have evoked both territorial bounding and the state’s prerogative to admit or exclude noncitizens, but this traditional association of borders with sovereign territoriality seems in conflict with empirical research on immigration and border policing. Databanking technologies, risk analysis, and surveillance practices allegedly allow state officials identify and detain dangerous individuals from the population far from the territorial margins of a nation-state. In addition, the interiorization and externalization of immigration policing—and the legal mechanisms that enable them—complicate notions of borders’ fixity. Paradoxical legal categorizations allow migrants to be physically present, yet excluded from legal protections, so that states can hold people simultaneously inside and outside the law. Moreover, new immigration laws sometimes work retroactively, calling not only the “where” but the “when” of migrant’s inclusion/exclusion into question. Topology, or the mathematical study of objects under continual transformation, seems to provide a provocatively nonlinear, open, and fluid alternative to Cartesian, cartographic space, one more capable of dealing with the  complexity of borders’ contemporary spatiality. However, while references to topological borders are rife, it is unclear how borders operate topologically. My aim is to refine and clarify a topological approach to borders and bordering, and to do so I bring recent conceptions of topological space to bear on immigration policing and border literatures.

Christophe Sohn, Geographer, Public Research Center, CEPS, Luxembourg 
The border assemblage: a conceptual exploration into border’s multiplicity

This paper is an attempt to conceptualize borders multiplicity by mobilizing the theory of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The aim is to examine how multiple meanings emanating from various actors constitute a border assemblage and how this heterogeneous grouping of different parts allows us to scrutinize in a new way the changing significance of borders. In the first place, an analytical framework addressing borders multiplicity in terms of structure and agency is elaborated. Based on their enabling or constraining effect over agency, debordering and rebordering processes are interpreted according to four ‘conceptual invariants’. In the second place, the concept of assemblage is mobilized in order to understand how these different meanings that do not form a coherent whole relate one with each other. The border assemblage, conceived as a relational approach to borders multiplicity, makes it possible to unravel the uneven power relations that are both constitutive of and mediated by the border. The theory of assemblage also allows us to take into consideration the non-linear processes of territorialisation and coding that stabilize or disrupt borders ‘identity’. This leads us to consider the notion of ‘topological invariants’. Lastly, a conceptualization of the connections that hold together the disparate elements is undertaken in order to be able to represent a border assemblage in contextuality. Based on discourse network analysis, new ways of mapping real world border assemblages are considered.

Gabriel Popescu, Geographer, Indiana University & IMeRA 
The topological imagination: territorializing mobile borders 

Current attempts to securitize transnational mobility are profoundly altering borders’ relationship to space. If modern political territoriality is built on a geographical imagination that sees space as a rigid object to be divided by linear borders, recently we are witnessing a changing geographical imagination to incorporate a polyvalent perspective that is more in tune with a notion of space defined by mobility and connectivity rather than by proximity and distance decay. Accordingly, we are witnessing the emergence of complementary forms of state borders that, shaped in large part by digital technologies, depart from the norms of territorial linearity by becoming embedded into flows that can travel and be monitored continuously across space. Such articulation of borders changes the way movement through space is organized and how people and places come into contact. This “portal-like” logic of border geography brings people and places together by connecting them directly across space, unlike modern border territoriality that connects them via contiguous state territories. However, just what kind of political territoriality these mobile borders engender remains unclear as the tension between the two geographical imaginations is proving difficult to reconcile in practice. While the network model is often advanced when it comes to representing topological phenomena, this falls short of capturing the more complex dinamics of technologically embedded border flows.

Alessandro Petti, Architect, Decolonizing Architecture Project, Palestine
Lawless lines

When historian and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti famously asked “who owns the ‘width of the line’?” he was referring to the 1949 cease-fire lines between Israel and Jordan. The lines, he wrote, had been drawn on a 1:20,000 scale map by the two military commanders— Moshe Dayan and Abdullah al-Tal. Meeting in an abandoned house in the frontier neighborhood of Musrara in Jerusalem, they laid out a map on the floor. Each drew a line using a different colored grease pencil: Dayan used green, and al­Tal, red. The thickness and softness of the colored pencils resulted in lines that were, generally, three to four millimeters wide. But because the floor under the map was uneven (or perhaps Dayan and al-Tal were a little careless), in some areas of Jerusalem the width of the line became wider.

Before and since then Palestine is traversed by these borderlines that aim to reduce modern geopolitics into a flat Euclidian space. However when these lines encounter reality, fields, olive and fruit orchards, roads, gardens, kindergartens, fences, terraces, homes, public buildings, mosques they produce a different reality.

By investigating the clash of these geopolitical lines onto the space of a house in Jerusalem, a mosque in the village of Burin, southwest of Nablus and in the unfinished and abandond Palestinian Parliament located in Abu Dis, we aim to revel how in Palestine, political spaces are not defined by the fictional partitions extablshed during two decades of “peace agreements”, but operate through legal voids. It is in these lawless lines that the regime manifest its nature but it is also in these extraterritorial dimension of these lawless lines that lays the possibility for tearing apart of the entire system of division.

*Research project developed with DAAR and Nicola Perugini

Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary, Geographer, University of Grenoble, France
The mobile border hypothesis

Facing a world where the forms and functions of borders do not coincide anymore, we are confronted with a paradoxical episteme: one tendency to see borders everywhere, as they multiply in all kinds of spaces; another tendency to account for their topographical disparition in favour of a world of connections, which abides by complex topological systems. A closer look into the territoriality of borders reveals that the power games engaged across the linear borders have not totally disappeared, transferred into high tech surveillance devices and data basis sets. The mobile border hypothesis allows opens the ground for reflexion on the political impact of new topologies. Does the fragilizing of sovereignty induce the disappearance of the democratic political ideal?

Stephanie Simon, Geographer, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands 
Border temporalities: The space-time topology of interoperability and situational awareness

 This paper focuses on the imaginations of temporal and spatial topology in contemporary border surveillance by considering the push for ‘situational awareness’ and ‘interoperability’ as the prized traits of border surveillance actors and operations. In particular, the paper focuses on the new European external border surveillance program, EUROSUR, which ultimately wishes to foster situational awareness and interoperability by forging alignments between spatially and temporally dispersed elements. The program’s security imaginary resonates with the language of topology in its ambitions to bridge, morph, and blend intelligence from wildly dispersed sources—from undersea sensors to outer space satellites, from European liaisons in Libya to transnational security bodies like FRONTEX—and arranged these disparate pieces in ‘interoperable’ databases and analyzed by ‘seamless’ technological, perceptual, and visual measures. Ultimately the goal is to produce ‘situational awareness’ for border security actors, which envisions a kind of dynamic knowledge of unfolding spaces in real time and the ability to act quickly within them. This paper argues that the ambition for situational awareness rewrites the underlying spatio-temporal logic of border practices in Europe. The topological space-time of situational awareness is to be able to take cues from emergent spaces and their continual transformations and to co-evolve with them in real time. The paper maintains, however, that while this topological imagination produces effects, it does not ultimately replicate its ideal in practice. That is, there is a gap between the topological surveillance imagination and its inability to translate this into practice. This paper explores how the failures and fragilities of the topological translation offer productive inroads for security critique.

Organizers

Gabriel Popescu (Indiana University & IMéRA)
Cedric Parizot (IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS-AMU)

Partnership

Institut Méditerranéen de Recherche Avancées (IMéRA, AMU), Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence, PACTE (UJF, CNRS), Isabelle Arvers, La compagnie, lieu de création

Image: DAAR, 2015

25 et 26 avril 2013
Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées – IMéRA (AMU)
Maison des Astronomes, Marseille

Economy, politics and art

Antoine Vion (sociologist, LEST, AMU)
Legal and illegal exchanges : the cartels’ role. Research summary of the Observatory of the economic structures of capitalism

Heidrun Freise (Social Anthropology, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum)
The Nascent Migration Industry. Lampedusa and the State of Exception

Georg Hobmeier (Artist, Gold extra)
Playing Politics – an attempt in serious game development

Flows of goods

Robert Ireland (Political Analyst, Head of the Research and Strategies Unit, WCO)
New Perspectives on the Customs Supply Chain Security Paradigm from antiAtlas of Borders

Mariya Polner (Political Scientist, Research analyst, WCO Research and Strategies Unit) et Thomas Cantens (Anthropologue, Administrateur à l’Unité Recherche et Stratégies de l’OMD et membre du Centre Norbert Elias EHESS-Marseille)
Time and Money at Borders

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (Science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Economic integration, economic flows and borders in North America and the European Union

Flows of people

Swanie Potot (Sociologue, URMIS, CNRS)
DMigrants serving the World Economy ?

Laurence Pillant (Géographe, AMU)
Du formel à l’informel : la continuité du système de contrôle migratoire à la frontière gréco-turque from antiAtlas of Borders

Cédric Parizot (anthropologue, IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS)
Traffickers and gardes frontières : confusion or synchronization? The Israeli-Palestinian case

Abstracts

Antoine Vion (sociologist, LEST, AMU)
Legal and illegal exchanges : the cartels’ role. Research summary of the Observatory of the Economic Structures of Capitalism (OPESC)

The work of the OPESC is particularly interested in the structuration of international cartels throughout the twentieth century. The first part of the presentation will address the structure of the oil cartel. It will emphasize its role in the delimitation of legitimate and illegitimate activities related to oil industries. This dynamic will then be compared to the structuration of the global opium cartel and its role in the structuring of the drug industry. The existence of highly structured global oligopolies brings out very clear boundaries between legal and illegal global trades. The comparison between these two cases raises questions about the emergence of new industry players, which may mark the end of a historical cycle of Western control of such industries. This would lead to a strong reorganization of customs activities, particularly in Asia and Africa.

Heidrun Freise (Social Anthropology, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum)
The Nascent Migration Industry. Lampedusa and the State of Exception

Given extensive media coverage, the island of Lampedusa became a prominent symbol of undocumented mobility in the Mediterranean. The intensification of border controls, the role of the Schengen treaty and the externalization of borders to the European ex-colonies in (North) Africa have been critically scrutinized. Similarly, the border-regimes and new forms of gouvernementalité that have fostered these processes have largely been addressed. Yet, institutionalized border economies and their massive interests have largely escaped attention. The paper therefore, addresses this nascent migration industry and various actors and stakeholders.

Georg Hobmeier (artist, Gold extra)                         
Playing Politics – an attempt in serious game development

Georg Hobmeier, member of the interdisciplinary art collective Gold extra, will present Frontiers, a game that leads to the borders of Europe. Frontiers is an online multiplayer game that portrays a refugee’s journey from the sub-Saharan region to Europe. Players can also chose to play as a border patrol. In either case, they‘ll get to understand borders and the struggles to cross them – in the Sahara, the beaches in southern Spain or the rainy container harbour of Rotterdam. The game is based on extensive research trips to the Ukraine, Slovakia, Spain and Morocco and on interviews with refugees, NGOs and authorities.

Robert Ireland (political analyst, head of the Research and Strategies Unit, WCO)
New Perspectives on the Customs Supply Chain Security Paradigm

This presentation is a brief history of the emergence of the Customs Supply Chain Security Paradigm, which at its heart was the customs contribution to counter-terrorism following 9/11. The “new perspectives” in the title are some concluding thoughts on where we are now.  In essence, the Customs Supply Chain Security Paradigm is fading as a prioritized customs policy issue, even for the United States. Following the 9/11 attacks, the paradigm emerged consisting of new national customs policies and World Customs Organization (WCO) standards intended to communicate that international cargo ships would be deterred from being used as  a conduit for the delivery of terrorists or terrorist attacks. This presentation traces the paradigm’s emergence and its upward trajectory which began with the launch of the two key US Customs programmes (C-TPAT and CSI), continued with the adoption of the WCO SAFE Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade, and reached a climax with the US 100% container scanning law.  It will discuss the major policy themes pushed by the US Government, namely advance cargo information submission requirements, customs risk management, non-intrusive cargo scanning equipment, and security-oriented Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) programmes.  It will then describe where we are now, namely a downward trajectory with the de facto abandonment of 100% scanning and the US budget crisis which foretells fewer resources for the paradigm. 

Mariya Polner (political scientist, research analyst, WCO Research and Strategies Unit) and Thomas Cantens (anthropologist, administrator the OMD Strategy and Research Unit, member of the Norbert Elias Centre EHESS Marseille)
Time and money of Borders: the case of transportation corridors in West Africa

This communication is based on empirical data on the public development aid projects and activities undertaken by international organizations in the area of trade regulation and standardization. It will analyze the movement of commodities through borders, especially in developing countries. The flexibility granted to goods more than to human beings is historically rooted, although it is usually presented within the contemporary intellectual framework related to globalization and development paradigms. This flexibility is connected to wealth circulation and accumulation and the representation of abundance existing beyond the territory or the community.

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Economic integration, economic flows and borders in North America and the European Union

Economic globalization and economic integration both in Europe and North America has provided scholars with enough evidence to suggest that regional integration would lead to the end of the nation state. Some scholars have argued that ‘spaces of places’ are being displaced by ‘spaces of flows.’ For instance, Manuel Castell writes that ‘bypassed by global networks of wealth, power and information, the modern nation state has lost much of its sovereignty.’ However, economists, such as Loesch or Helliwell continue to argue that borders increase costs and that borders act as trade barriers. In this paper, I detail the various aspects of these arguments to argue that, because borders link markets and politics, market flows are becoming a defining aspect of borders. This in turn also suggests that borders are bent, twisted, and remodeled by market flows and forces.

Swanie Potot (sociologist, URMIS, CNRS)
Migrants serving the World Economy?

Borders are made visible by the barriers erected around states to protect their territory from the entry of ‘undesirable’ migrants. Yet, boundaries still operate within the national territory, distinguishing people whose presence is fully legitimate from those who are only tolerated, i.e. accepted under certain conditions but kept out of the national community. This presentation will focus on contemporary migrant workers. Their increasing mobility drives them to experience boundaries, not only during their many travels, but also in France where their working conditions and the laws supposed to protect them are specific, yet differing from the rest of the workers. After returning to the profound changes occurred in labour migration in Europe over the last twenty years, three figures of workers whose alien status creates the conditions for a particular exploitation will be presented: foreign employees on temporary contracts, so-called undocumented workers and, finally, the new « posted workers ». This will lead us to explore the border from the inside and its use by various stakeholders.

Laurence Pillant (geographer, TELEMME, AMU)
From formal to informal : the continuity of the migration control system at the greco-turkish border

Studying the border economy has proven to be a major methodological tool to approach and understand migration controls at the Greek-Turkish border. However, beyond the methodological aspect, the border economy analysis shows how formal and informal activities constituting and surrounding migration controls are narrowly linked and contribute to isolate migrants from the local society.

Cédric Parizot (anthropologist, IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS/AMU)       
Traffickers and gardes frontières : confusion or synchronization? The Israeli-Palestinian case

This presentation provides an ethnographic account of the informal smuggling networks that helped Palestinian workers from the West Bank enter Israel between 2007 and 2010. Most of the literature that has documented this phenomenon focused primarily on the experiences and perceptions of workers condemned to precarity and clandestinity. It emphasizes their suffering or, conversely, values their ability to resist and survive in a context of increased insecurity and injustice. Without neglecting the suffering of Palestinians, I will strive to bypass these approaches. As Lila Abu Lughod (1990) pointed out, the idea of resistance tends to overestimate the power of the oppressed. It promotes, also a binary construction of the conflict. Opposing the Israelis to the Palestinians, the concept of resistance overlooks multiple actors and intermediate interactions who actually play significant roles. Finally, by focusing only on the suffering of the Palestinians, we risk limiting the focus of analysis to Israeli power. Moving the gaze from the workers to the smugglers, I suggest here an ethnography that takes into account all the actors involved in the process. I would show how Palestinians and Israelis intervene, both formally and informally, to facilitate the passage of Palestinians workers from the West Bank to Israel. Having taking over gaps and opportunities created by the regime of Israeli control, they maintain a «crossing economy”. They thus contribute to the functioning and the readjustments of the Israeli regime of mobility alongside Israeli authorities.

Organisation

Cédric Parizot  (IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS-AMU)

Partnership

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

March 7, 2014
Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’Homme, Aix en Provence

The time and money of border

Mariya Polner (political scientist, research analyst, WCO Research and Strategies Unit) et Thomas Cantens (anthropologist, research analyst, WCO Research and Strategies Unit and Centre Norbert Elias EHESS-Marseille)

Based on a review of development assistance projects and of trade standardization and regulation attempts carried out in international institutions, the communication will examine the passage of goods at the border, particularly in developing countries. Although often presented in the contemporary frame of globalization and attached to the paradigms of development, the flexibility granted to the passage of goods is old, linked to the circulation and accumulation of wealth and the representation of abundance beyond the territory or the community.

Organisation

Cédric Parizot(IREMAM, IMéRA, CNRS, AMU)

Partnership

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman, Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie, Ecole supérieure d’Art,
Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Photo: Thomas Cantens, Limani, Cameroun, 2013

February 13-14, 2013
Higher School of Art,
Aix en Provence

This research seminar will discuss the way security and technological escalation have impacted State borders over the last 20 years. It will implement a trans-disciplinary perspective by bringing together human scientists (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, political scientists), hard scientists (artificial intelligence, computer sciences) and artists (webart, hypermedia). In the first workshop, the speakers will discuss the increasingly sophisticated technologies (robots, drones, biometry, technosciences) deployed nowadays along State borders as well as within and beyond these spaces. The socio-historical perspective adopted within the second workshop will help better grasp the processes within which this technological escalation is embedded. Finally, the third workshop will present two trans-disciplinary works discussing the pervasive and diffuse character of border controls. Between biographies and codes, borders pervade human bodies and flows of digital data.

Drones, robots & technoscience

Noël Sharkey (artificial intelligence, University of Sheffield)
Robots at the border: new weapons, new problems?

RYBN.ORG (collectif artistique, Paris)
AAntidatamining: Borders to the test of financialized economy

Charles Heller (filmmaker and writer, Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Forensic Oceanography: subverting surveillance, demanding accountability

Klaus-Gerd Giesen (science politique, Université d’Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand)
The biopolitical normalization of the human: a fractal regulation beyond and below borders” from antiAtlas of Borders

De l’identification à la biométrie / From Identification to Biometry

Martine Kaluszynski (socio-historienne, PACTE, CNRS, Grenoble)
From anthropometric notebook to biometric passeport: Identification, a State building practice

Hidefumi Nishiyama (politics and International Studies, University of Warwick)
Bordering bodies in Imperial Japan and beyond

Gabriel Popescu (geographer, Indiana University, South Bend)
Border bodyscapes and precarious life from antiAtlas of Borders

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Borders, Theory and Security: the border, here, there, and everywhere

Frontières intrusives/Pervasive borders

Joana Moll (new media artist, Barcelone)
Move and get shot: Surveillance through social networks along the US-Mexico Border

Nick Mai (anthropologist, London Metropolitan University)
Emborder : the biographisation of borders

Jean Cristofol (philosophe, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence)
Flows, Images and borders

Résumés/Abstracts

1. Noël Sharkey (artificial intelligence, University of Sheffield)
Robots at the border: new weapons, new problems?

The first decades of 21st century will be seen as the age of unmanned vehicles. Since 2002, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in war zones has increased dramatically. Many of these are armed and controlled from thousands of miles away. Now this technology has proliferated to at least 76 countries and there is a massive international market. The developments have expanded to unmanned ships, submarines, cars and ground robots and they are beginning to make an appearance in the civil world with police and border protection agencies. This talk will examine the development of the technology and lead to a discussion about how it might be applied in the future border protection to keep people, keep people out or to keep people in.

2. RYBN.ORG (collectif artistique, Paris)
Antidatamining: Borders to the test of financialized economy

The governance model of the Nation-State is now competing with the management methods of financial capitalism. A number of recent events confirm the strengthening of such trend: the appointment of Mario Monti and Loukas Papadimos in Italy and Greece, the sovereign debt crisis, etc. This redeployment of power requires to redefine and redraw the maps of these ongoing tensions by reassessing the notions of State security, border legislation, suffrage, labor law, tax, and market. This presentation intends to identify the fault lines between financial capitalism and the Nation-State and to inventory the techniques and technologies that are part of this reconfiguration.

3. Charles Heller (filmmaker and writer, Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Forensic Oceanography: subverting surveillance, demanding accountability

In this paper I will present some of the work we have been doing on contentious incidents at sea  and the tools we have developed to account for them within the Forensic Oceanography research project. I will start by contextualising this project by sketching in broad terms the tension between the governance of flow and the partitioning of the seas that characterises maritime governance, the broad geopolitical significance of the Mediterranean and the conditions in which the attempt to control the maritime borders of the EU operates. I will then address in more detail the sensing tools – radars, automated vessel tracking data, satellite imagery – that are central to the “sorting mobilities” in border control within densely travelled areas. I will argue that despite their sophistication, these sensing technologies reach their limits when confronted will the mobility of illegalised migrants. As a matter of fact, the militarisation and technologisation of migration control at sea have revealed to be deadly – over 13.000 cases of migrants deaths have been counted by NGOs. Finally, I will describe our investigation into a particular contentious incident at sea that has allowed us to go beyond counting and denouncing the deaths of migrants at sea and demand accountability.

4. Klaus-Gerd Giesen (science politique, Université d’Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand)
The biopolitical normalization of the human: a fractal regulation beyond and below borders” from antiAtlas of Borders

This presentation aims at analyzing the regulatory attempts introduced by human genetic technoscience at the world scale. Starting with the crisis of dominant humanism, it examines the transition towards a biologizing era in which “everything is genetical”, as well its ideological justifications. Particularly, the presentation underlines the way in which instrumentalization of bioethics committees and technological assessment programs (at the national, supranational or international levels) favor of the normalization of the human in biological terms. In the process, borders are transformed into multiple public institutional networks arranged as polymorphic, discontinous and complementary configurations, which are created or deconstructed out of necessities and compelling needs for political legitimation.

5. Martine Kaluszynski (socio-historian, PACTE, CNRS, Grenoble)
From anthropometric notebook to biometric passeport: Identification, a State building practice 

Technologies of social control and instruments of identification instruments are governmental techniques that helped the building of the Nation-State. Anthropometry has allowed for the first time to establish scientifically the identity of offenders and to punish recidivists. The combination of a rigorous establishing of the defendants’ descriptions juxtaposed and a rational technique of classification has lead to the instauration of a sophisticated and effective judicial register. These elements shaped the cornerstone of the anthropometric system. The development of this method, its implementation, its results and its consequences have helped the enforcement of law, order and repression, as well as the establishment of a republican technique (and “a policy”) of government based on identity. This general process of rationalization of police techniques in order to identify individuals (Bertillon, fingerprinting, etc.) has faced a profound transformation in France since the last third of the nineteenth century leading to the INES project (Secured National electronic Identity) suggested in 2005 by the French Ministry of the Interior. This intensification of technologies reflects a reorganization of modes of expressions of public authorities. It raises questions about the consequences of its search for a new efficiency and legitimacy. Indeed, this process has brought public authorities to increasingly anchor themselves within society and to rely on technological developments that blur the classical borders between security and freedom, justice and policing, repression and surveillance.

6. Hidefumi Nishiyama (politics and International Studies, University of Warwick)
Bordering bodies in Imperial Japan and beyond

In 1926 Japanese scientists led by Furuhata Tanemoto, a professor of forensic science and later the chief of National Research Institute of Police Science, began to classify racial and ethnic groups by calculating their fingerprints. The Scientific measurement, or what Furuhata calls the ‘fingerprint index,’ established a correlation between fingerprint patterns and racial and ethnic groups who were accordingly categorised into the spectrum of civilisation and the hierarchical order of the empire: from ‘civilised’ and ‘Japanese-type’ identity to ‘primitive’ and ‘dangerous’ one. This paper conducts a historical case study of Japanese scientific research on fingerprints between the 1920s and 1930s in which bodies became space of bordering practices by predicting their dispositions and criminality. Spatialisation of bodies was twofold: on the one hand bodies were spatialised in a sense that physical bodily features became sphere of production of a particular identity; and on the other hand bodies were also territorialised into a geographical location and the spectrum of political powers. By historicising biometric identification, the paper further attempts to throw light on the relationship between identity and identification including in contemporary border controls in which the un/desirability of bodies are continuously calculated in a similar but yet distinct manner.

7. Gabriel Popescu (geographer, Indiana University, South Bend)
Border bodyscapes and precarious life from antiAtlas of Borders

Risk management strategies associated with the quest to securitize transnational mobility have triggered a technological race to embed borders into the human body. The belief is that mobile risks can be estimated from mobile bodies and efficiently eliminated along the way, so that traffic flows are not disrupted at the border. Accordingly, bodies are imagined as spaces to inscribe borders on. This logic of power has adopted a view predominant in natural sciences that sees the body as a material object that can be rendered digitally knowable with the help of technology. Biometric technologies, among others, are used to acquire comprehensive knowledge about every mobile body even before it crosses state borders. Then, these bodily data are used to classify people in terms of good versus bad mobility in order to produce categories that are amenable to risk contingency calculus. In this way, knowledge of the body results in power over the body. This is, at the same time, power over the most intimate and mobile of spaces. A closer examination reveals that such logic of spatial control tends to imagine border automation as panacea for reconciling unfettered mobility and territorial security. Biometric technology is understood as a tool that would allow predicting future threats and threatening behavior. Contrary to claims that digital border technologies simply aid human decision-making, the manner in which they are implemented suggests that border automation aims to assume self decision-making capabilities that diminish human involvement in the act of bordering. In this context, it is important to understand if biometric bordering can reduce uncertainty to make life more secure or if it is creating more uncertainty making life more precarious.

8. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Borders, Theory and Security: the border, here, there, and everywhere

The 18th and 19th centuries were disciplinary eras where societies implemented a type of power, a set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, and technologies that were anti nomadic. Today’s era is control. This is a time when a type of power, and technique allows the body to become a password in a coded flow, allowing access to mobility and status. In the meantime security which was traditionally conceived as mono-sectoral and focused on the military, is now multi-sectoral. This suggests the importance of thinking clearly about the balance between sectors, types of threats, actors and elements, which together have important implications for security policies. Security policies are more complex, because issues identified as security threats are also more diverse; they are plural and multi-faceted in nature. Border security policies struggle with these new complex dimensions of security. Indeed, this new complexity is reflected in various uneven ways in state border and borderland policy and affects their neighborly and international relations. This increased complexity in security matters also has consequences for definitions of borders and borderlands – it is the border here, there, everywhere. 

9. Joana Moll (new media artist, Barcelone)
Move and get shot: Surveillance through social networks along the US-Mexico Border

The Texas Border and AZ: move and get shot are two net-based artworks which explore the phenomenon of surveillance on the internet carried out by civilians on the border between Mexico and the US. Many of these online platforms appeared during the rise of the social networking service whose structure was adopted as a cheaper and more efficient alternative way to monitor the border. Thus, the recreational activity became a tool for militarizing the civil society. This talk will expose the research process behind the two artworks and will analyze the evolution of some of these net based platforms from its inception to the present.

10. Nick Mai (anthropologist, London Metropolitan University)
Emborder : the biographisation of borders

Because of the increasingly restrictive policies framing global migrations, the granting of asylum and the social protection of vulnerable migrant groups have become new biographical borders between the West and the Rest of the world. Within the humanitarian governance of migration, gender and sexuality have become strategic narrative repertoires through which hierarchies of belonging and barriers to mobility are reinforced. The focus on the sexual dimension to construct and control specific groups of migrants as vulnerable through humanitarian interventions can be defined as ‘sexual humanitarianism’. The Emborders (Embodying Biographical Borders) filmmaking/research project problematizes the effectiveness and scope of sexual humanitarianism by comparing the experiences of two groups of migrants who are addressed as potential ‘target victims’: migrants working in the sex industry and sexual minority migrants. Emborders assembles the narratives of victimhood and emancipation they perform in the context of original research interviews and ethnographic observations.

11. Jean Cristofol (philosophe, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence)
Flow, images and borders

Pictures are moments captured, shared, modified in the circulation of information flow. Thus they contribute to form the very substance of our everyday experience, not only as objects that we encounter and convey meaning, but as the changing reality of the environment in which we find ourselves. Hence, the place of images has been modified as well as the relationship between images to places. The main issue at stake is no longer only the separation between the image of the world and the world of images, but that many ways in which the interpenetration of the world and images occurs. This new position of the image is related to the way one can think of the space of information flows. For a long time cyberspace was thought as a second sphere in which one could immerge oneself; a world without borders that was be deployed beyond the geographical space, or in which the forms of separation and closure were of a different nature. It must be noted that what is currently happening is significantly different. Current immersions into cyberspace taking the form of the intrusion or “pervasion”. It is the relationship between image and immersion and pervasion that will be discussed in this talk.

Organisation

 

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS-AMU)
Jean Cristofol (Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence)

Partners

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Poster : Myriam Boyer

December 6-7, 2012
Maison des Astronomes, IMéRA,
2, place Le Verrier
13004 Marseille

This research seminar will revolve around three axes: a review of the discussions we have developed during our program in 2011-2012; the presentation of transdisciplinary approaches of border; and finaly, the preparation of the art-science exhibition, the antiAtlas of Borders that will take place at the Tapestry Museum of Aix en Provence in October 2013.

The review of last year workshops

Antoine Vion (sociologue, LEST, AMU)
Borders and Networks

Stéphane Rosière (géographe, HABITER, Université de Reims)
Materialization and dematerialization of borders

Anne Laure Amilhat-Szary (PACTE, Université Joseph Fournier, Grenoble)
At the borders of art and science

Transdisciplinary experiments

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS), Antoine Vion (Sociologue, LEST, AMU), Wouter Van den Broeck (Data visualization, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italie; Addith.be)
De la contrebande à la visualisation des réseaux: Cartographier un parcours anthropologique entre Israël et les Territoires occupés palestiniens (2005-2010)

Douglas Edric Stanley (Hypemédia, Game-Art, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence)
Vous avez été mangé par une grue ! Navigation spatiale et jeux vidéos

Olivier Clochard (Géographe, MIGRINTER, CNRS, ADES/Terre Ferme)
Où est la frontière?

Borders, images and exhibition

Jean Cristofol (Philosophe, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence)
Art et représentation

Isabelle Arvers (commissaire de l’exposition l’antiAtlas des Frontières)
Présentation du scénario de l’exposition l’antiAtlas des Frontières (octobre- novembre 2013)

Organisation

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM)

Partnership

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Photo: Jean Cristofol, Corée du Sud, DMZ, novembre 2012

June 6-8, 2012
Maison des astronomes
IMéRA
2, place Le Verrier
13004 Marseille

The aim of this seminar is to discuss the difficulties, modalities, or impossibilities by which we can represent borders in their complexity (breaking up, flexibility, punctiform, virtual, etc.), asymmetrical experience, and the new modes of circumvention invented by mobile populations.

Nick Mai
Presentation of Emborders: problematizing sexual humanitarianism through experimental filmmaking

Heath Bunting
Build a new identity workshop

Mapping border and transgressions

Olivier Denert (Secrétaire Général de la Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière)
Cartography of borderlands : presentation of the Transfrontier Operational Mission (TOM) Atlas (context, method, consequences and uses)

Aurélie Arnaud & Michel Chiappero (Institut d’Urbanisme et d’Aménagement Régional, AMU, laboratoire LIEU, Marseille)
The cartography of complex objects: the border

Ron Terrada (Artiste, Canada)
See Other Side of Sign

Towards a non representational approach of borders

Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (PACTE, Université Joseph Fournier, Grenoble)
Embodying the border : for a non-representational approach to borders

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM) et Ariel Handel (Tel Aviv University)
Indexing uncertain spaces : West Bank Palestinians facing Israeli systems of control (2005-2010)

Jérôme Epsztein (INMED-INSERM U901)
Neuronal networks to represent space and its borders

Staging the border

Patrick Bernier et Olive Martin (Artistes, France)
Across the fields : a way of skipping school

Norma Iglesias Prieto (San Diego State University)
‘Transborderism’ and Social Imaginary in the U.S.-Mexican Border from antiAtlas of Borders

Atelier LIMO (Simon Brunel & Nicolas Pannetier, collectif d’artistes-architectes et cinéastes, Berlin).
« Border Speaking » : from the abstract notion to the space of the project

Round-table : transgressing border research

What first conclusions for the renewal of border analysis can be drawn from this first year of methodological dialogues between sciences, technologies, representations and art

The panelists will summarize and discuss the outcomes of the workshops that were previously held in the context of the ‘Borders in the 21st Century’ transdisciplinary project. These workshops address strategic issues such as the role of networks, technology and dynamics of materialization / dematerialization in the transformation and representation of borders in contemporary times. Altogether, the project shows that formal and experimental scientific and artistic theories, models and techniques provide useful conceptualization tools that can productively be intersected with social science analyses. These innovative conceptualizations were presented to people involved in the control and management of borders (customs authorities, government officials, security industrials or military representatives) and were recognized as useful tool to discuss the practical, social, political and ethical implications of the different forms of contemporary border transformations examined in the context of the project. They constitute important steps toward the publication of an Anti-Atlas of Borders at the Turn of the 21st Century, an initiative that will showcase the outcomes of the ‘Borders in the 21st Century’ transdisciplinary project through an innovative art/science platform, including a book, an interactive website and an exhibition.

Abstracts

Nicola Mai (Anthropologist, IMéRA/London Metropolitan University)
Emborders: problematizing sexual humanitarianism through experimental filmmaking

The contemporary increase and diversification of migration flows on a global scale coincides with the onset of humanitarian forms of governance. These contain and manage ‘undesirable’ migrants that are strategically constructed as vulnerable. Because of the increasingly restrictive policies framing global migrations, the granting of asylum and the social protection of vulnerable migrant groups have become new embodied borders between the West and the Rest of the world. Fundamental rights are allocated on the basis of the performance of ‘true’ victimhood repertoires, reproducing the suffering body of the migrant as a strategic tool to elicit compassion and solidarity. Within the humanitarian governance of migration, gender and sexuality have become strategic narrative repertoires through which racialised hierarchies of belonging and barriers to mobility are reinforced. The focus on the sexual dimension to construct and control specific groups of migrants as vulnerable through humanitarian interventions can be defined as ‘sexual humanitarianism’.

The Emborders filmmaking/research project problematizes the effectiveness and scope of sexual humanitarianism by comparing the experiences of two groups of migrants who are addressed as potential ‘target victims’: migrants working in the sex industry and sexual minority migrants. Both groups can be targeted by sexual humanitarianism as potentia victism of sex trafficking and sexual minorty refugees respectively. Emborders assembles the narratives of victimhood and emancipation they perform in the context of original research interviews. The filmmaking/research project draws on real stories and real people, which will be performed by actors to protect the identities of the original interviewees and reproduce the performance of their self-representations through interviews. Emborders is a scientific reconstruction of the life histories of migrants targeted by sexual humanitarianism. It is also an artistic reflection on the inherently fictional nature of any narration of the self. By using actors to reproduce real people and real life histories, the film project ultimately challenges what constitutes a credible and acceptable reality in scientific, filmic and humanitarian terms.

Emborders : problématiser l’humanitarisme sexuel par le cinéma expérimental

L’augmentation et la diversification contemporaines des flux migratoires à l’échelle mondiale coïncident avec l’apparition de formes de gouvernance humanitaire. Celles-ci gèrent des groupes de migrants «indésirables», qui sont stratégiquement construits comme vulnérables. Parce que des politiques plus restrictives encadrent les migrations mondiales, l’octroi de l’asile et la protection sociale des groupes de migrants vulnérables sont devenus de nouvelles frontières corporelles entre l’Occident et le reste du monde. Des droits fondamentaux sont attribués sur la base de la performance dans le répertoire de ‘vraie victime’, dans lequel la mise en scène du corps souffrant du migrant devient un outil stratégique pour susciter la compassion et la solidarité. Dans la gouvernance humanitaire globalisée des migrations, le genre et la sexualité sont devenus des répertoires narratifs stratégiques. A travers ces répertoires, les hiérarchies entre les origines ethniques et les classes sociales, ainsi que les barrières à la mobilité qui y sont associées, se trouvent renforcées. « L’humanitarisme sexuel » peut se définir comme l’accent mis sur la dimension sexuelle pour construire comme vulnérables et contrôler des groupes spécifiques de migrants par des interventions humanitaires.

Le projet de recherche/filmmaking Emborders problématise l’efficacité et les finalités  de l’humanitarisme sexuel en comparant les expériences de deux groupes de migrants: ceux qui travaillent dans l’industrie du sexe et ceux qui appartiennent à des minorités sexuelles. Les deux groupes sont respectivement ciblés par l’humanitarisme sexuel comme victimes potentielles de traite et comme réfugiés sexuels. Emborders assemble les récits de victimisation et d’émancipation que les migrants des deux groupes produisent dans le cadre des interviews de recherche. Le projet présente de vraies histories de vie et de vraies personnes, qui seront jouées par des acteurs pour protéger l’identité des interviewés et pour reproduire la dimension performative qui caractérise leur autoreprésentation dans le contexte des interviews. Emborders est une mise en scène scientifique des histoires de vie des migrants ciblés par l’humanitarisme sexuel. Il est également une réflexion artistique sur la nature intrinsèquement fictionnelle de toute narration de soi. En utilisant des acteurs pour mettre en scène de vraies personnes et de vraies histoires de vie, le projet problématise ce qui constitue une réalité crédible et acceptable en termes scientifiques, filmiques et humanitaire.

Heath Bunting (Artist and activist, Bristol)
Build a new identity workshop

Heath Bunting will present the project Status, initiated in 2004, which offers a system for the digital production of identities. The project consists of a database containing more than 5,000 entries on the various elements of identification of a person. This system is available at irational.org. From the interconnection of all these data it produces maps representing networks and generating a social status.

All of our actions and movements are traced. To take a subscription to the library, a transit card or to make a purchases online, wec onstantly fill in forms where we allow anodyne data about us: name, address, credit card number, phone … By combining all available data about a person, it is possible to assign a social status. Status reveals how such constructions then influence our mobility within the social space online or offline.

Olivier Denert (Secrétaire Général de la Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière)
Cartography of borderlands : presentation of the Tranfrontier Operational Mission (TOM) Atlas (context, method, consequences and uses)

The TOM published its first cross-border map in 1999, which made visible for the first time cross-border workers flows between France and its neighbouring countries. An Atlas containing over a hundred  plates was published in 2001, then extended and re-published in 2007, and its maps are since regularly updated. The presentation will show the innovative reach of such an approach, both on technical and political levels. It will also address the numerous technical difficulties that any crossborder data producer and conceiver meets in relation to both the statistical and cartographical dimensions. This kind of approach has remained without equivalent in France or in other European countries and we will discuss the different uses and impacts of such a tool on cross border knowledge.

Aurélie Arnaud & Michel Chiappero, IUAR (Institut d’Urbanisme et d’Aménagement Régional, AMU, laboratoire LIEU)
The cartography of complex objects: the border

Cartographic production has considerably evolved in the past years due to the advent of geovisualization. However, static maps remain a very valued communication tool to represent cross-border phenomenons, as witnessed by the World Atlases and the SciencePo-Paris cartography workshop productions. The latter however show a lack of reflection on the cartographic representation of the “border” object which is characterized by both an uncertain temporal dimension and a number of thematic features which are to be represented simultaneously, etc. The cartographic language edited by Bertin in 1967 remains valid, but a semiologic void limits its representation. Considering past investigation both on information organization and the research launched by the Hypercarte (Grasland et al, 2005) project on cross-border cartographic representation, we discuss the study of cross-border cartographic representations. Which themes / objects are treated on the maps? Which graphic representations are attributed to those objects? What kind of captions are attached to these maps? In order to answer our questions, we will first try to build generic object / class diagrams for two very distinct cross-border regions which differ by their geolocalization, their culture, politics and natural environment but nevertheless also offer some similitudes. Both cases cover international land and maritime scales : Central Andes (Chile-Peru-Bolivia-Argentina) and the Mediterranean. This scale is yet but little studied within this field. The aim of these diagrams it their use by cartographers and geomatic professionals undertaking borderland applications. Secondly, we will outline a critical state of the art review concerning cross-border objects, including recognized conceptual references and using graphic semiologic grids (Bertin, 1967 and Béguin et Pumain’s grid, 2000) as well as one “chorematic” grid (Brunet, 1986). The aim of this work is to orientate representation choices which can then be integrated within the diagrams. The final objective of this research is to open a discussion on a possible universal method of cross-border cartography.

Ron Terada (Artist, Canada)
See Other Side of Sign

As a visual artist, my primary material is language. Much of the language or text used in my work is found, familiar and perhaps overlooked; I treat language as a cultural readymade. Expanding on propositions raised through pop and conceptual art, my work has evolved from painting into printed matter, to the dissemination of pop music, and on to various forms of signage–both within the gallery structure and as interventions in the public sphere. The work not only operates within a field of consumption and circulation specific to the artworld, but also within a broader, yet complex, social and political field. For Re-imaging or Re-imagining Borders, my discussion will focus on my interest in signage, with a particular emphasis on two key works as it pertains to borders: Entering City of Vancouver (2002) and You Have Left the American Sector (2005), both large highway-type signs which seek to heighten the idea of a border and to suggest a symbolic change within the landscape.

Anne Laure Amilhat Szary (Géographe, PACTE, Université Joseph Fournier, Grenoble)
Embodying the border: for a non-representational approach to borders

Beyond the critical analysis of the gaze, in great part initiated by feminist geographers, it is the irruption of the body within landscape analysis which is at stake. It is the entire human body which, feeling and living its environment, makes landscape. Some landscape specialists have, more and more, integrated their paths and the sensations which this wandering arises : “When I look, I see with landscape” (Wylie 2007). One could therefore agree on attributing a more complex performative power to landscape than just saying that it imposes power. This approach, researched in the past ten years, has been recently qualified as “relational” landscape analysis (Crouch 2010). This term has the advantage of putting forward the interaction between the material and sensorial components of the environment, while getting around the issue of their representation, criticized for the distance it imposes. If those works rely on phenomenology, it is to discuss one of its important elements, the notion of representation itself, putting forward the fact that concept building from perception does not necessarily need to be mediated by representation.

Landscape illustrates this difficulty : both signifier and signified, it can only be grasped by bypassing semiologic analysis. My work is based on the link which contemporary visual artists build with borderlands, and follows a reasoning which Nigel Thrift (Thrift 2008) has characterized as a “non-representational theory”. Valorizing its practical value, such an approach could have had the inconvenient of almost totally erasing the possible esthetic finality of landscape. Artistic approaches allow us to enter into landscape through image analysis, without reducing one to the other. I offer to work on the image built by walled borders as well on its transformation by visual artists. Research about cultural production in and about borderlands open questions on the status of the image – icon – simulacrum within space – power relationships.

Cédric Parizot (Anthropologue, IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM) et Ariel Handel (Géographe, Université de Tel Aviv)
Indexing uncertain spaces : West Bank Palestinians confronted to Israeli mechanisms of control (2005-2010)

Since the outburst of the second Intifada (2000), Israeli Authorities have introduced a great deal of uncertainty into daily Palestinians’ mobility within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Between 2000 and 2005, the multiplication of road obstacles and random controls, made it difficult to plan the time and the trajectory of a trip, as well as to project oneself into a cartographic representation of space. It also became difficult for a person to know when he/she is observed for the agents of control are hidden within watch towers or behind systems of cameras. Finally, the multiplication of regulations and authorities in charge of their implementation created an arbitrary system within which the right of movement is never gained. During the post Intifada period (2005-2010), the Israeli authorities have relaxed this system of control. Yet, Palestinian movements are still affected by a certain degree of uncertainty.

Many researchers have assessed the impact of these control mechanisms on space practices. While some simply assume the effects of particular devices (such as the panopticon), others appraise their impact through the study of extremely rich stories of daily experiences. Yet, by focusing on the effects of these control mechanisms rather than on the reactions and the adaptations of Palestinians, these scholars limit themselves to the sociology of power.

On the contrary, by focusing on such reactions and adaptations, we suggest to study the ways by which Palestinians develop alternative forms of indexation of spaces and their trajectories. This does not mean neglecting the disturbing effects of these mechanisms of control on Palestinian daily lives. It means examining how local actors that are subjected to it can, to a certain extent, reintroduce a degree of certainty and recover a relative hold of their daily travels.

Jérôme Epsztein (Neurobiologiste, INMED-INSERM U901)
Neural networks to represent space and its borders

How we represent space and our place in a given environment has been an object of epistemological thinking for centuries. Recently, with the development of experimental psychology and neurosciences, we have started to address this issue from an experimental point of view. The work done during the last thirty years has revealed a number of regions of the brain and neural networks involved in the specific coding and storage of spatial information. The “place cells” are neurons of the hippocampus, a region located in the temporal lobe of the brain, which are active only when an animal is in a given location in its environment. In contrast, the activity of “grid cells” of the entorhinal cortex, another region of the temporal lobe, is modulated periodically following a matrix of equilateral triangles covering the entire environment. The “head cells” are active when an animal is oriented in a given direction while other neurons are specifically activated by certain geometric borders in the environment. The activity of this ensemble of cells may determine how we represent and memorize our position in space.

Patrick Bernier et Olive Martin (Artistes, France)
Across the fields: A way of skipping school

Starting from our personal experience as artists motivated by transdisciplinary exploration, we will present many of our projects. We will try to share and question this desire to share and hybridise our field of activity, that of contemporary art, with others, whether close, like cinema (Manmuswak, movie, 16′, 2005), or more distant, like law (‘Plaidoirie pour une jurisprudence’-‘Plea for a case law’, performance, 45′, 2007).

Norma Iglesias Prieto (San Diego State University)
Transborderism and Social Imaginary in the U.S.-Mexican Border

The starting point is the idea that the border—both in its geopolitical and symbolic dimension—marks the life and experience of subjects and that this condition, in turn, marks the way in which we represent the border. That is, the social imaginary is built from a series of varied social representations that respond to different border conditions. My work analyzes the levels of transborderism and their relationship to the levels of complexity of social representations in the U.S.-Mexican border, particularly that of Tijuana and San Diego. In my presentation, I will speak first of the theoretical statement that support the notions of border and transborderism; second, I will analyze diverse cultural expressions (visual arts, oral narratives, cinematographic animations) that show the different levels of complexity of social representations in this particular border.

Atelier LIMO (Simon Brunel & Nicolas Pannetier, collectif d’artistes-architectes et cinéastes: Berlin).
« Border speaking » : from the abstract concept to the space of the project

Within this intervention, we offer to present the methodology that we developed in order to understand the border object. We will do so by dissecting the different phases of our ‘Border Speaking’ project, on which we worked between 2006 and 2009. From the initial wandering to the organization of cultural events in some symbolic border places, passing through the photographic listing of over 200 control posts, this presentation will build over the following points:

– Understanding a concept through wandering > 3 months of travelling
– Representing through the building of markers > 238 border landmarks
– Visible and invisible, the border and its memory > the movie
– The border, projected space > re-interpretation of cross-border places.

These points will be illustrated by a presentation of our database (database.atelier-limo.eu), an excerpt from our documentary movie « The inner border” and a three minutes video presenting the « Border Speaking » project.

Organisation

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM)
Anne Laure Amilhat-Szary (PACTE, Université Joseph Fournier, Grenoble)
Isabelle Arvers (Curatrice indépendante, Marseille)
Jean Cristofol (École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence)
Nicola Mai (IMéRA/London Metropolitan University)

Partnership

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Photography : Myriam Boyer, IMéRA, 2012

April 19-20, 2013
Maison des Astronomes, IMéRA,
Institut d’études avancées d’Aix-Marseille
2 place Le Verrier 13004 Marseille

The use of technology to control flows of people and goods across borders is quickly becoming an ubiquitous practice. The “smart borders” initiative and “virtual fence” project in the United States, the Schengen border’s centralized intelligence system, robot patrols and high-tech fences between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, sentinel killer robots in South Korea and, of course, the worldwide adoption of the electronic passport standard are just a few iconic examples of broader dynamics and trends. The development of these bordering technologies is linked to the widely spread assumption that they provide efficient tools to identify and stop undesirable and ‘suspect’ individuals and groups within global flows. The deployment of technological bordering devices raises a series of crucial questions for it participates into the broad transformations of the nature, the shapes of borders, spaces and territoriality.

“Smart borders”: state of the art

Amaël Cattaruzza (Géographe, Maître de conférences, Ecole Saint Cyr Coëtquidan)
Border control : the temptation of technology

Mariya Polner (Political Scientist, Research analyst, WCO Research and Strategies Unit)
Border control technologies: general trends and patterns of development/Technologies de contrôle aux frontières: tendances et formes de développement

Philippe Bonditti (Politologue, Professeur assistant, IRI/PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brésil- et chercheur associé au CERI-Sciences Po Paris, France)
Flux et frontières. « Technologisation » des contrôles et traçabilité/ Flows and borders: “Technologization” of control and traceability

Robots and border control

Sylviane Pascal (Security & Europe Defence Business Development Manager ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab)
TALOS project: stakes and perspectives of ground robots use at borders

Noel Sharkey (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Professor, University of Sheffield)
Bordering on the ridiculous: controlling our movements from the sky

When things bite back

Daniel Kopecky (Lieutenant Colonel, Chef du département relations internationales aux Ecoles de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan)
Technology at the borders: the limits of the system. Lessons learned from an expertise mission in South-East Asia

Thomas Cantens (Administrateur à l’Unité Recherche et Stratégies de l’OMD et membre du Centre Norbert Elias EHESS-Marseille)
Taming or Taking Ownership : Effects of technological transformations of custom control on the administrations and the nature of borders

“Wireless” control: implementation, effects, re-appropriation

Gabriel Popescu (Geographer, Assistant Professor, Indiana University South Bend, US)
Remote Control Technologies and the Production of Topological Border Spaces

Dana Diminescu (Sociologue, EC Telecom Paristech, dir scientifique du programme TIC Migrations FMSH Paris)
Connected migrants: ‘WU?’ in the sociology of migrations

Christophe Bruno (Artiste, Commissaire d’exposition) & Samuel Tronçon (Philosophe, Résurgences, Marseille)
ArtWar(e) – towards a Facebook application to detect artistic forms

Abstracts

Amaël Cattaruzza (Maître de conférences, Ecole de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan)
Border control: The Temptation of technology

In October 2006 the American Congress voted the Secure Fence Act and planned the construction of a 1 100 km fence at the Mexican/United States border. This project aimed to prevent illegal immigration, drug smuggling and terrorism. It included the deployment of a « systematic surveillance of the international land and maritime borders of the United States through more effective use of personnel and technology, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, ground-based sensors, satellites, radar coverage, and cameras » (Secure Fence Act, Section 2). The use of surveillance technology seems to be one of the key elements of security making, because it apparently allows a systematic and global surveillance of the border area. Such technologies would face the uncertainty and the unpredictability of illegal influx. Few years before, the American concept of smart borders had introduced technologies in order to identify merchandises (chips and microchips) and individuals (biometric controls, electronic cards, etc.). Nowadays, the American example is not exceptional and the use of technologies in the field of border control is more and more current in the world (as for the Schengen borders in Europe). This lecture will attempt to stress the state of the art of the use of technology for border control and to consider the meaning and the consequences of this use on the configuration of borders? Does technology lead to the « ubiquituous border », as described by the geographer Stephen Graham?

Mariya Polner (Political scientist, Research analyst, World Custom Organization, Research and Strategies Unit)
Border control technologies – general trends and patterns of development

In a globalised world where interconnectedness and integration are key dynamics influencing economic growth and social development, policymakers are increasingly realizing the need for accelerated border management regulatory reform to reduce unnecessary barriers and burdens on trade. However, the fruits of globalization are used not only by legal businesses, but also by illegal traders. Therefore, border agencies face a serious challenge of balancing security and trade facilitation. The World Customs Organization (WCO) has developed a set of instruments in order to assist Customs Administrations in promoting the balance between the two, and technology plays a pivotal role striving for this objective. Deployment of technology, however, has never been and will never be a “silver bullet” to solve all public policy objectives.  This presentation will start with discussing the changing environment in which border agencies operate, with a focus on the notion of ‘border’ and its changing meaning over time. After the overview of WCO instruments we will look into different kinds of technologies that are currently in use, as well as those that are now being developed. We will also discuss issues pertaining to the operationalisation of technologies, as they become vital for any agency that considers using them. Finally, we will discuss critical aspects of technology development which would allow it to remain an indispensable tool in the hands of Customs.

Philippe Bonditti (Politologue, Professeur assistant, IRI/PUC Rio -Rio de Janeiro, Brésil- et chercheur associé au CERI-Sciences Po Paris, France)
Flows and borders: “Technologization” of control and traceability

For nearly 20 years, the fight against “terrorism” and other transnational phenomena have raised “border security” as a crucial issue among the so-called defense and security issues. Everywhere around the world, the “Smart Borders” programs develop. Yet, far from “enforcing” the borders, the “technologization” of borders is one of the major factor of the confusing of the image of the geopolitical world. It reminds us that border control does not target borders as much as the flows that might cross them. These controls – commonly said to happen at the “border” – are actually made in very specific points (checkpoints) that do very rarely match those which compose the lines by mean of which we came to represent the border on the maps of the geopolitical world. Moreover, they are made before one becomes mobile by mean of a “deterritorialized regime” of control of flows which we propose to further explore in this presentation based on the case of the United States, and also partly on the case of Europe. The aim is to emphasize the networking logic that animates security apparatuses, the ways in which this logic impact on contemporary practices of borderization and the emergence of traceability as the major technique of contemporary governmentality.

Sylviane Pascal (Defence Business Development Directorate ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab)
TALOS project: stakes and perspectives of ground robots use at borders

TALOS (Transportable and Autonomous Land bOrder Surveillance system – www.talos-border.eu) is a European research project co-funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme under the Security thematic area. The main objective of TALOS is to develop and test innovative mobile and autonomous systems aimed at protecting EU land borders. Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are major components of the TALOS project. TALOS addresses the surveillance of large land border areas, which was recognized by the European Commission as a strategic ability for its border security mission. Its aim is to help the detecting, tracking and apprehending of people attempting to cross the border outside of surveilled and authorized routes. To meet the challenges posed by the diversified nature of the European Union’s external border, the system needs to be adaptable, transportable and cost-efficient.

Noel Sharkey (Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, University of Sheffield)
Bordering on the ridiculous: controlling our movements from the sky

Plans to automate killing by robot have been a prominent feature of most US forces’ roadmaps since 2004. The idea is to have a staged move from man-in-the-loop to man-on-the-loop to full autonomy. While this may create considerable military advantages it raises ethical concerns with regard to potential breaches of International Humanitarian Law. Moreover, we are already seeing these new technologies being deployed at borders in countries such as US, Latin, America, South Korea and Israel. Drone technology alone has proliferated to more than 51 countries and police forces are beginning to use it routinely. The talk will discuss the development of the technology into the near future as it becomes more autonomous and explore the ethical dimensions.

Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Kopecky (Chef du département relations internationales aux Ecoles de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan)
Technology at the borders: the limits of the system. Lessons learned from an expertise mission in South-East Asia

Based on lessons learnedfrom an expertise mission with the Royal Thai Army and technical studies carried out for French security industries, the speaker will focus on two specific areasof South-East Asia: the Thailand-Burma border and Malaysia’s southern border (Borneo Island).

Thomas Cantens (Anthropologue, Unité Recherche et Stratégies de l’Organisation Mondiale des Douanes et membre du Centre Norbert Elias EHESS-Marseille)
Taming or Taking the Ownership : Effects of Technological Transformations at Borders on Administrations and Nature of Borders

From a few examples of technologies introduced in the Customs administrations in sub-Saharan Africa and an ethnography conducted in an African Customs reforming for more than four years, the communication will develop three main ideas. First, because they are new “lands of reform” and strongly influenced by the outside, customs administrations in Africa use technologies equally and sometimes more extensively than Customs administrations of “developed” countries. Second, these technologies are “tamed”: they upset the established order and are at stake to establish new orders and relations of authority and power within the administration and beyond, for example, professions-partners (brokers, freight-forwarders, banks). Third, the technologies are vectors to transform political relations between states, under pressure from donors who support the policies of regionalization,  economic integration, and liberalization, without always having the desired effects.

Gabriel Popescu (Geographer, Assistant Professor, Indiana University South Bend, US)
Remote Control Technologies and the Production of Topological Border Spaces

Mobility imperatives under globalization are profoundly altering borders’ relationship to space. Risk management strategies associated with the quest to securitize transnational mobility have triggered a technological race to embed borders into all kinds of flows in order for the border to be able to travel with the flow and be ready to be performed whenever circumstances require. With the help of technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) borders are disembedded from their local contexts, projected at distance, and then re-embedded anywhere in the state territory. Such articulation of borders changes the way movement through space is organized and how people and places come into contact. This “portal-like” logic of border geography brings people and places together by connecting them directly across space, unlike modern border territoriality that connects them via contiguous state territories. This situation opens up the entire space of the globe to bordering processes, thus accelerating the proliferation of borders and multiplying the actors involved in their establishment. The implications for society of such novel border spatiality are paramount. It is vital to understand how is democratic participation to be spatially reorganized to assure border governance remains in the public domain.

Dana Diminescu (Sociologue, TIC-Migrations, FMSH, Paris)
Connected migrants: ‘WU?’ in the sociology of migrations / Migrants connectés: “K29?” dans la sociologie des migrations

According to the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, the process of migration is marked by a double absence, as migrants are uprooted from their ‘home’ societies and they fail to ‘integrate’ in their countries of emigration. In this perspective, the migrant experience is characterized by a permanent break with the places that link the individual with his or her native environment as well as by the confrontation with a world that thinks and lives differently. Current understandings of the experience of migration, whether they refer to issues of cultural identity of integration, refer to and focus on a series of breaks and oppositions. These are constructed as inherent to migrants’ fate and are constantly used in theoretical reflections on populations on the move. For instance, migrants are described according to binary oppositions such as: mobile/immobile, neither there nor here, absent/present, central/peripheral, and so forth. This understanding of people’s movements is an historical and sociological simplification and does account for the way the world was transformed by the onset of generalized mobility and by the spread unprecedentedly complex means of communication. Today, the definition of the migrant based on different forms of rupture considered to be fundamental and radical is in trouble. Alternative organizing principles emerge, as mobility and connectivity mark the experiences of contemporary migrants. In this talk, my aim is to analyse the different and interlinked forms of rootedness, displacement and connectedness that are experienced by contemporary migrants. Contemporary sociological studies of migration must focus on issues of connectedness and of presence. These days it is increasingly rare to see migration as a movement between two distinct communities, belonging to separated places that are characterized by independent  systems of social relations. On the contrary, it is more and more common for migrants to maintain distant relations that are similar to relations of proximity and to be able to activate them remotely on adaily basis. This mediated bond — via telephone, email, or Skype- — makes it easier than before to stay close to one’s family, to others,  to what is happening at home or elsewhere. The development of communication practices —from simple ‘conversational’ methods where communication compensates for absence, to ‘connected’ modes where the services maintain a form of continuous presence in spite of the distance — has produced the most important change in migrants’ lives. Migratory practices (in particular the activation of networks, remote organization, and the monitoring of movements), the way  mobility is experienced and implicitly the construction of new  “home  territories” have been thoroughly transformed.

Christophe Bruno (Artiste, commissaire d’expositions, Paris) et Samuel Tronçon (Philosophe, Résurgences, Marseille)
ArtWar(e) – towards a Facebook application to detect artistic forms

ArtWar(e) is a platform for « artistic risk management » and « computer assisted curating ». One of its main goals is to visualize waves of emergence, obsolescence, import-export of artistic concepts, as well as to detect formats. Contrary to art history, where forms are labeled once they have been formatted, ArtWar(e) seeks to track these trends as soon as they emerge, before they have been named and filed as art. It is quite a kafkaesque project, for it uses the most powerful surveillance tools ever built, such as Facebook, in order to observe the slightest moves of the social life of forms. We shall present the methodology and the principles of the Facebook application we are working on.

Organisation

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM),
Amaël Cattaruzza (CREC, Saint Cyr-Coëtquidan),
Nicola Maï (London Metropolitan University, IMéRA)
Gabriel Popescu (Indiana University, South Bend)

Partnerships

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

22-23 mars 2012
Maison des Astronomes, IMéRA
Institut d’études avancées d’Aix-Marseille
2 place Le Verrier 13004 Marseille

The materiality of 21 century’s walls and borders systems

Stéphane Rosière (géographe, HABITER, Université de Reims)
Border barriers : thresholds, types, rationals

Elisabeth Vallet (politologue, Chaire Raoul-Dandurand, UQAM, Montréal)
The building process of border barriers

Hervé Braik (Business Segment Manager, Border Security Systems, C4I Defence & Security Systems Division Thales)
Les Systèmes de surveillance des frontières/ Borders surveillance systems

Materializing/dematerializing of borders : a matter of definition?

Paolo Cuttitta (politologue, Università di Palermo)
The construction of a border island: The Lampedusa case

Shira Havkin (politologue, CERI, IEP de Paris)
The Transformation of the Israeli « Border » Security Apparatus and the Outsourcing of the Checkpoints

Stéphanie Latte Abdallah (historienne, IREMAM, CNRS, Aix en Provence)
Border Denial : Carceral Web and Palestinian Political Prisoneers Management after Oslo (1993-2010)

Olivier Clochard (géographe, ADES/Terre Ferme)
The dilution of border within the territory

Transgressing material and immaterial borders

Cédric Parizot (anthropologue, IMéRA, IREMAM, Aix Marseille University, CNRS)
Crossing and taking over a dysfunctional wall: the Israeli-Palestinian case

Build a new identity workshop

Heath Bunting (artiste)

Résumés/Abstracts

Stéphane Rosière (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Habiter, Université Matej Bel, Slovaquie)
Border Barriers : Thresholds, types, rationals

In this presentation, the notion of ‘border barrier’ will be discussed and especially the notions of threshold, types and logics operating in this artefacts. The notion of threshold aims to define from point we can speak of ‘barrier’ on a border. Materially oonexistent borders is the best symbol of globalization, it is the archetype of the ‘borderless world’ while the ‘barrier’ is its opposite. The question of type aims to distinguished different kind of technologies and essentially wall and fence. The distinction betwenn wall and fence will be discused on a symbolic point of view. The efficiency of High-tech fences and the difficult measure of these artefacts will be underlined. Finally, in terms of logics, border barriers will be questioned on musltiscalar way : logics of functioning and logics of appearance/construction. In terms of finctionning, we will underline their connection with xheckpoints as border barriers are not erected to stop all flows but to select them. Thses checkponts are included in networks and connected with (national or international) data bases. At the international scale, border barriers seems to be linked with geopolitics macrologics as essentially with wealth (development) discontinuities.

Élisabeth Vallet (Chaire Raoul Dandurand, UQAM)
The Building Process of Border Barriers

While drawing a border is, by definition, a bilateral process, building a wall is a unilateral act that freezes a line of demarcation. A border can be seen as an area of contact and influence but the advent of a world without constraints or standards, particularly economic standards, is leading to the creation of barricades around populations as states retreat into the security of feudal reflexes, testifying to certain undercurrents of globalization that paradoxically are encouraging a return to a kind of ‘neo-feudalization’ of the world. Thus the return of the wall as a political tool may be symptomatic of a new era in international relations, redefining interstate couples around the world. As such the US perception of its own borders is symptomatic of this trend. We will explore the history and impact of the border wall issue in a comparative perspective (southern border v. border as well as in other hemispheres) as the US border wall is a relevant referent to explore more complex (and less accessible) fenced borders of the post cold war era.

Hervé Braik (Business Segment Manager, Border Security Systems, C4I Defence & Security Systems Division Thales)
Borders surveillance systems

More and more countries are facing increasing illegal entries at their borders. Main Threats are smuggling, illegal migration and more rarely terrorism. In order to fight against these criminal activities, public authorities are putting in place border surveillance systems. Based on different complementary technologies, these systems help border guards in their daily surveillance and intervention tasks through enhanced automation and higher performances. These solutions improve the global efficiency of the border monitoring activities.

Paolo Cuttitta (politologue, Università di Palermo)
The construction of a border island: The Lampedusa case

Why is Lampedusa more ‘border’ than other Italian and European border spots? I start from the assumption that Lampedusa’s high degree of ‘borderness’ results not only from its geographical location within the current historical context, but also from a specific ‘borderisation’ process. Specific policies and practices of immigration control have transformed the island in the Strait of Sicily not only into a hotspot of the Italian and EU border regime, but also into a stage on which the narratives of the ‘tough border’ and of the ‘humane border’ coexist in the performance of what I call the ‘border play’. After summarising Lampedusa’s ‘borderness’ from different points of view (the volume of immigration by sea, the deadly consequences of border controls, their compliance with human rights, the agency of migrants etc.), I will analyse the main measures and practices as well as the narratives prevailing, between 2004 and 2011, in five different acts of the ‘border play’.

Shira Havkin (politologue, CERI, IEP Paris)
The Transformation of the Israeli Border Security Apparatus and the Outsourcing of the Checkpoints

In Israeli political geography, borders are at the same ambivalent and concrete. Three of Israel’s external national borders are considered temporary and lack international recognition. However, these seemingly ambiguous borders are maintained and re-drawn by very concrete and developed security apparatuses, controlling entrance, exit and movement in territories under Israel’s control. These apparatuses include the complex system of checkpoints and barriers in and around the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but also the construction of a wall on the Israeli-Egyptian border, as well as a set of administrative reforms in Israeli authorities, such as the re-structuring of immigration police.
In this presentation, I discuss recent reforms in the security apparatuses of border-control in Israel, grounding them in the context of Israeli society, its social processes and its political economy. The outsourcing of military checkpoints in the OPT to private security companies, in place since 2006 is a particularly interesting case study. This reform, officially addressed as “civilianization”, has been considered as de-militarization of control over the populations of Palestinians. My analysis of this reform and its modalities reveals that this assumed de-militarization is parallel to processes of re-militarization of Israeli civil society, as well as to the expansion of neoliberal logic. Building on this study, I demonstrate the heterogeneous modalities in the current re-structure of security apparatuses and the subsequent conceptual and material re-configuration of borders.

Stéphanie Latte Abdallah (historienne, CNRS, IREMAM)
The prison web in Palestine: Boundaries and Porosity between inside and outside

The Israeli prison system towards Palestinians widens on the Occupied Territories a prison web which is both a reality and a prison virtuality, i.e. a capacity to imprison almost everybody from the age of 12 years. The prison web creates a suspended space, which geographical, legal and temporal limits are vague, and in some respects indefinite. This communication so intends to reconsider the question of the borders and the limits (between Israel and the occupied territories/ between inside and outside) in the Israeli-Palestinian spaces from the modalities of the confinement of the Palestinians in connection with the territorial divisions in the Occupied Territories and the practices intended to mitigate confinements and fragmentations.

Olivier Clochard (géographe, programme Terrferme / ADES / Univ. Bordeaux 3)
The dilution of the border in the territory

The detention centers of the European Union and its neighbouring countries are of great diversity. Of the important administrative detention centre recently built – according standards of major hotel chains – to the informal space marked by degrading material conditions, all these places form one or more devices whose boundaries are sometimes difficult to grasp. If the firsts have legislative frameworks increasingly complex, the existence of the latter is often the result of local assemblies, ad hoc, one-off. But both types of structures are part time – marking the contemporary migration policies – and have become milestones in the journey of the exiles. Finally the mobility between these places – and within its structures – involved in the development of borders with the societies in which migrants hope to live.

Cédric Parizot (anthropologue du politique, CNRS, IREMAM/IMéRA)
Crossing and taking over a dysfunctional wall: the Israeli-Palestinian case

The development and the automation of surveillance technologies are often perceived as means to deploy more reliable, standardized, predicable control than human control. I will show that this approach is misleading: it is not possible to dissociate surveillance technologies from the political, social and economic conditions in which they are implemented. Because they are deployed and associated to pre-existing control apparatus, institutions and specific policies, surveillance technologies reproduce the contradictions and mistakes of the systems and actors that implement them. Through this process they often modify the reality that they are expected to master and create unforeseen challenged. I will illustrate the claim through the case study of the Israeli separation barrier built in the West Bank. Based on field observations, I will show that the functioning of these technology of control cannot be apprehended without taking into consideration their dysfunctions and the way they are re-appropriated by formal and informal actors aside of the State.

Organisation

Stéphane Rosière (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne)
Nicola Mai (London Metropolitan University)
Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM)

Partenerships

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Photo: Cédric Parizot, Bethlehem, 2008

January 26-27, 2012
Maison des Astronomes, IMéRA, Marseille

Network perspective and case studies

In this session, through the presentation of three case studies we will discuss the relevance of different conceptualizations and theories of networks in understanding both state control mechanisms and circumvention processes deployed by actors on the ground. What kinds of boundaries do networks challenge and reproduce? How can they become controlled and manipulated by state powers? How can they in turn control and manipulate the mobility of people and the surveillance targeting them?

Olivier Clochard (Géographe, programme Terrferme / ADES / Univ. Bordeaux 3)
Construction de réseaux dans le contrôle frontalier de l’Union européenne

Francesca Sirna (Sociologue, ANSO-UCL)
Réseaux, espaces et mobilités : le cas des Piémontais et des Siciliens en Provence

Nicola Mai (Anthropologist, Reader in Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University)
Of trafficking and other networks: the moralist criminalisation of migrant networks supplying the sex industry

Conceptualizing, analyzing managing networks and fluxe

The participants of this session will try to provide a general view of mechanisms, techniques and methodologies by which state authorities, smugglers and hard scientists conceptualize networks of data, mobilities and materialities. Whose interests do these technologies and governmentalities serve? What forms of political resistance and complicity can emerge in the process?

Lionel Pascal (expert douanier (OMD et FMI), Bordeaux IV-Montesquieu)
Réseaux et frontières : des contrôles detérritorialisés

Cédric Parizot (Anthropologue, CNRS-IREMAM, membre du comité de pilotage de l’IMéRA)
Individualizing control, duplicating borders: Biosocial profiling, sponsorship and smuggling networks between Israel and the West Bank

Representing networks and network practices

This third session will address the ways by which networks could be represented through different images and devices and the implications these representation have at different levels. How do we represent networks? Who do they represent? What are the differences and similarities emerging between the political and the scientific dimension of the representation of networks? Can we transcend subjectivity and politics in understanding and representing networks?

Wouter Van den Broeck (researcher, designer, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italie; Addith.be)
The language of network representations

Christophe Bruno (artiste et commissaire d’expositions)
Art et réseau, cartographie de flux, cycles et échelles

Antoine Vion (Sociologue, LEST, AMU)
What does the representation of ‘transnational networks’ refer to ? Reconsidering data, contexts, and borders

Résumés/Abstracts

Olivier Clochard, géographe (programme Terrferme / ADES / Univ. Bordeaux 3)
Building networks to strengthen the border control of the European Union

According to Claude Raffestin, networks are a form of registration of power over space. And technical developments such as computer databases and administrative detention centers turn over the border they do not eliminate, by moving it on both sides of international boundaries by expanding the scale of border region and connecting it to other places. What relationships can be established between the reconfiguration of European borders started since the ninety, the evolution of administrative detention centers and the establishment of computer databases? How the networking of these devices is related to the establishment of border migration?

Francesca Sirna (Sociologue, ANSO-UCL)
Réseaux, espaces et mobilités : le cas des Piémontais et des Siciliens en Provence

L’objectif de cette intervention est de reconstruire les séquences génératives de comportements migrants dans des contextes donnés, en essayant de détailler et d’expliquer les différences entre immigration « de proximité » (Piémontaise) et de « longue distance » (Sicilienne).

Le choix d’installation des Piémontais et des Siciliens en Provence relève également de questions d’ordre différent. Quel est leur rapport au territoire d’émigration et d’immigration ? Est-ce que l’ancienneté de la présence en pays d’immigration peut déterminer des modes d’insertion différents dans les pays d’accueil ? Est-ce que les Piémontais et les Siciliens, en partageant le même lieu d’immigration, se côtoient, s’aident, font partie du même réseau migratoire, du même groupe de «migrants italiens » ? Est-ce que le départ a le même rôle pour les deux groupes et pour leurs familles restées dans les villages d’origine ? Quel type de liens unit les migrants et les sédentaires ?

J’ai voulu privilégier la dimension processuelle, dynamique et historique du phénomène migratoire, afin de montrer les tâtonnements, les incertitudes et les revirements de trajectoires certes individuelles, mais insérées dans un entrecroisement de relations qui partent du village d’origine pour s’étendre au niveau international.

Nicola Mai (Anthropologist, Reader in Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University)
Of trafficking and other networks: the moralist criminalisation of migrant networks supplying the sex industry

The granting of asylum and the social protection of vulnerable migrant groups have become strategic borders between the West and those of the Rest of the world. In the process, state benevolence and fundamental rights are allocated on the basis of the performance of ‘true’ victimhood scripts according to well-rehearsed politics of compassion. Anti-trafficking moral panics and social interventions play a strategic role within the deployment of these neoliberal governmentalities. By criminalising the involvement of young female and male migrants in the sex industry and the personal and professional networks they use to migrate in terms of trafficking and exploitation, the anti-trafficking paradigm enforces new embodied borders and hierarchies of mobility. Paradoxically, these reinforced borders and the parallel criminalisation of the networks of migrants working in the sex industry produce the exploitative conditions that anti-trafficking rhetoric and social interventions aim to eradicate.

Lionel Pascal (Expert douanier OMD et FMI, Bordeaux IV-Montesquieu )
Des contrôles déterritorialisés 

The border crossing is a « à la carte » passing system ! Everything is set up to obtain informations (intelligence) about people, transport means and merchandises before they arrive. For this to happen, services use their networks so that they can collect data allowing them to choose an appropriate checking form to the supposed risks, using a computer analysis forcing agents to follow the instructions resulting from this analysis. The collected data come from in from every other services in charge of the safety and of the crossing with other archived elements. The unknown and doubful people will have to undergo a thorough check.

Cédric Parizot (Anthropologue, IREMAM-CNRS, IMéRA)
Individualizing control, duplicating borders: Biosocial profiling, sponsorship and smuggling networks between Israel and the West Bank

This presentation focuses on sponsorship that Palestinians need from an Israeli citizen in order to apply to an entry permit into Israel. It shows that this rule makes the belonging to a network often more relevant than the bio-social profile of an individual regarding mobility access. Yet, this study does not merely assess the impact of an administrative procedure on people practices and rights. Based on ethnographic investigations carried out since the mid 1990s between Israel and the West Bank, studies the ways by which Israeli, Palestinian and international actors have taken over these regulations, and the power relations they entail, in order to serve their own interests and develop new economic activities. Relying on the assumption that personal networks are constitutive of mobility access, this presentation will explore the ways these re-appropriations of local actors and these networks restructure people relationships to space, territory and borders.

Wouter Van Den Broeck (Designer, Data-driven Exploration of Dynamical Networks)
The language of network representations

In this presentation I will outline a bottom-up analysis of the applications, mechanisms and constraints of network representations. This analysis will lead us from the basic nature of data and information, over the mechanisms of visual representation of information in general, to the grammar and semantics of network representations in particular.  Its aim is to provide a common ground for reasoning about networks and their representations across disciplines.

Christophe Bruno (artiste et commissaire d’expositions).
Art et réseau, cartographie de flux, cycles et échelles

Ses travaux (détournements, installations, performances, œuvres conceptuelles…) proposent une réflexion critique sur les phénomènes de réseau et de globalisation dans les champs du langage et de l’image. Il présentera quelques-unes de ses œuvres, notamment divers détournements de structures globales du Web 2.0, comme le « Google Adwords Happening », performance au sujet du prix des mots sur le réseau. Il montrera également ses projets plus récents comme le Dadamètre (www.iterature.com/dadameter) qui traite de cartographie des concepts sur le Web, et Artwar(e) (en collaboration avec le philosophe Samuel Tronçon, www.artwar-e.biz). Ce dernier projet concerne la gestion des risques et l’analyse de tendances dans le champ de l’art. S’inspirant à la fois de méthodes marketing comme les « cycles de hype », des « cycles de Kondratiev » du système-monde à grande échelle, et de la théorie contemporaine des réseaux,  Artwar(e) a pour objectif de détecter les phénomènes d’émergence, d’obsolescence et d’import-export de concepts, en particulier sur les réseaux sociaux. Il parlera aussi des travaux qu’il poursuit actuellement en tant que commissaire de l’espace virtuel du Jeu de Paume, avec les expositions « identités précaires » et « blow-up ».

Antoine Vion (Sociologue, LEST, Aix Marseille Université)
What does the representation of ‘transnational networks’ refer to ? Reconsidering data, contexts, and bordersA quoi réfère la représentation des réseaux transnationaux ? Pour un nouvel examen des données, des contextes, et des frontières

Les études de réseaux sont marquées par l’émergence d’un pan de plus en plus important d’analyses traitant de réseaux transnationaux. Ontologiquement, la question de la transnationalité des liens qui structurent de tels réseaux semble souvent tenue pour acquise, alors même que le modèle conceptuel qui sous-tend l’idée de dynamique transnationale doit être précisé. Mais même lorsque cela est établi, l’attention aux réseaux transnationaux suppose un examen scrupuleux des données, et de leur fiabilité au regard des critères définis. Un deuxième problème est lié au sens que produit la représentation des réseaux transnationaux. En suivant Goodman & Elgin, on rappellera que toute forme de référence est difficilement séparable d’un contexte qui rend possible une compréhension de l’objet. Cela pose à ceux qui dessinent ou lisent une représentation graphique de réseaux transnationaux un défi particulier lorsque les graphes appuient une étude comparative ou longitudinale. Partager des connaissances d’arrière-plan est nécessaire pour repérer les frontières politiques ou sociales que font ressortir les graphes, ce qui suppose des dispositions que tout le monde n’a pas. Il y a donc un enjeu à outiller la représentation graphique de ces frontières pour les rendre plus explicites et discernables, ce qui suppose l’intégration complexe de propriétés propres aux données, de changement de contexte et des modes d’existence sociale de la frontière.

Organisation

Nicola Mai (London Metropolitan University)
Cédric Parizot (IMéRA/CNRS-IREMAM)

Partnerships

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Photo: Cédric Parizot, Southern West Bank, 2006