When the digital despairs: Excluding through the everyday use, non-use and careless use of digital technologies
Panel 24 / Quinto Convegno Nazionale SIAC “SPERARE / DISPERARE / DESIDERARE”
Matera, 25-27 settembre 2025
Proponenti: Giovanna Santanera (Università di Milano – Bicocca), Davide Biffi (Università di Milano – Bicocca)
Abstract
The dominant narrative connects the so-called “digital transition” to the hope for a better future. However, the link between digital technology and addiction, violence, surveillance and exploitation is also clearly emerging. We would like to explore the dark side of digitalization in migration. We are not interested in technologies clearly designed to “despair” (e.g. biometric ones at borders), but in technologies that have another purpose and that are nevertheless used (more or less intentionally) to exercise violence on migrant people. In what ways do violence, exclusion and racism manifest through practices and discourses connected to the digital (such as police headquarters’ selective digitalization, the use of video calls to interview asylum seekers in jail, the necessity to have an account to access certain rights, the use of apps in the labor supply chain)? We welcome contributions that ethnographically explore violent, frustrating, inconclusive, incomprehensible, digitally-mediated encounters between migrant people and institutions in Italy or elsewhere, to reveal the subtle, oblique and continuous ways in which the use (or non-use, or purposefully “wrong” and careless use) of technology (re)produces exclusion and inequality at the micro level of everyday life.
Keywords: Digitalization, Technology, Migration, Exclusion, Racism
Lingue accettate: Italiano / English
Per sottomettere un paper scaricare il seguente format e inviarlo a: giovanna.santanera@unimib.it; davide.a.biffi@gmail.com
To submit a paper download the following format and please send it to: giovanna.santanera@unimib.it; davide.a.biffi@gmail.com
