Globally, the language of technology structures migration politics. Ever-new digital, automated and AI-driven technologies used for surveillance, decision-making and deterrence are central to the “border spectacle” (De Genova, 2013). The buzzword “smart borders” commonly captures the widespread digitalization, automation, and datafication of migration control and the expansion of racial capitalist security regimes by technological means.

In this presentation, I draw on two empirical projects in order to envision interventions to the ways new technologies become legitimised and enrolled into the scripts of “border technopolitical regimes” (Chaar López, 2024).

First, I draw on ongoing fieldwork in London, New York, and Hong Kong that engages with stakeholders overseeing and rationalising the introduction of AI in urban migration governance in global cities. Preliminary interview results show how policy-makers, lawyers and technologists negotiate how machine-learning technologies become elements of the city as an “inner border”, becoming part of expanding urban surveillance infrastructures.

Second, the technopolitics of migrant surveillance by ‘smart’ means is historical. As shown by an archival tracing of technologies used for ‘kinship surveillance’ of migrants’ family relations (DNA fingerprinting, blood group testing, and digital ‘rapid DNA testing’) shows historical legitimisation strategies of aligning new allegedly ‘smart’, undeceivable, datafied technologies with the logics of the border regime.

With these two examples, the presentation exposes the historical and contemporary discursive work of enacting the technopolitics of border regimes. In order to advance critiques, I argue that historicised understandings of the border’s technopolitics are needed to disrupt techno-solutionist implementations of technologies, seen as innovative leapfrog steps, void of politics and history. Such historical technopolitics cannot be coded or updated away, but urgently need radical alternatives as the ongoing rationalisation of new border technologies is rampant.

About the speaker:

Professor Philipp Seuferling is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Communications in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. Philipp’s research explores the long temporalities of media, communication and technology in migration and borders, seeking to advance critiques of increasingly digital and automated border regimes. Philipp is finalising his first monograph Encampment. A media history of control and humanitarianism (University of Illinois Press). Other ongoing projects include the history of DNA and kinship surveillance by border authorities, the calculation of mobility worthiness among Huguenot refugees in 1600s England, as well as the introduction of AI in urban migration governance in global cities.

📅 Date: Thursday, 9 April, 2026

🕑 Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

📍 Venue: CJT-9.29

🗣️ Language: English

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=105816

***Philipp will be visiting HKU from 6 to 27 April 2026. Contact: philipp.seuferling@glasgow.ac.uk