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The Border as Networked Platform: Enmity and the Information Regime

Monday, March 10, 2025 4:30–6:00 PM

Description

Borders in the United States have never been a mere line in the sand. Since the early twenty-first century, a range of systems work in concert to produce the Border Patrol’s “change detection capability”: unmanned aerial systems (UASs), agents performing sign cutting, relay towers, remote video surveillance systems, imaging sensors, and unattended ground sensors, among many others. This talk argues this arrangement prototyped the border as a networked platform because actors approached it as a complex, interlocking yet changing system of information. Drawing on my book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, this talk explores how the politics of enmity and data inform the making of U.S. sovereignty.Iván Chaar López is an Assistant Professor of Digital Studies in the Department of American Studies and the Principal Investigator of the Border Tech Lab, a research collective at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching examine the history and politics of computing and information infrastructures. With his Lab, Chaar López studies computing in the Americas, digital labor and the future of work, and data infrastructures in border enforcement. He is the author of The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (Duke University Press, 2024) and co-author of Precarity Lab's Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths Press, 2020).This lecture is part of the 24-25 Digital War speaker series of the Peace and Conflcit Studies program

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