Seminar: Borders, (im)mobilities and databases

Martina Tazzioli, Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna, will show how European border regimes deploy “technologies of suffocation” that dismantle migrants’ life-support infrastructures, choking not only their movements but also their capacity for social reproduction and future aspirations. Paul Trauttmansdorff, STS researcher and postdoc fellow at the Technical University of Munich, will talk on” Assembling and Contesting Imaginaries of Digital Borders” and examine how European imaginaries of digital borders, centered on seamless data flows and frictionless governance, are institutionalized through eu-LISA and interoperability projects, while also highlighting their contested, dehumanizing effects and the possibilities for alternative futures.

Theatre and exhibition maker Thomas Bellinck, actress and theatre maker Manizja Kouhestani, and investigative journalist and filmmaker Reza Adib will share material and artistic strategies from their works.

We are excited to invite you to an interdisciplinary seminar that brings together critical academic scholarship and artistic practices to interrogate the complex reality of the contemporary European border control regime, and its technologies.

Combining scientific and artistic regimes of engagement, the seminar explores how imaginaries of the present and future of digital borders, with their promises of order, seamless governance and frictionless flows of bodily data, are constructed, as well as how the lived reality of administrative, and spatial tactics, policies and technologies of borders

The seminar is part of the DiNoBord public seminar series, which started at the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Gothenburg in May 2025, and will continue to Oslo in the early Spring 2026. Read more