AMRO22 Friday Evening Lectures

(In)visibilities of Aerial Surveillance

Border Forensics is an agency conducting spatial and visual investigations into practices of border violence perpetrated by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.

Working in collaboration with migrant communities and civil society organisations, Border Forensics documents and exposes the violence linked to the existence and management of borders with the aim to foster mobility justice.

The central Mediterranean is one of the key frontlines of the global mobility conflict. While until recently this conflict was being fought at sea by means of naval assets, the battle for the Mediterranean has recently shifted to the air: since 2018, EU agencies and states have further reduced their presence at sea, while increasing their aerial presence through a growing number of manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft.

Giovanna Reder researcher at Border Forensics will talk about the ongoing investigation into the shifting modalities and reflect on (in)visibilities of surveillance and aerial control.

The Evolution of Data

In this talk, I would like to talk about the practice of data as an investigative method. Data-driven investigations bring together a wide variety of disciplines and techniques. They combine code, design, and analysis and thus can not only extend previous forms of research but also develop and execute entirely new methodologies. I want to highlight different aspects of data-driven methods and their opportunities for systematic investigations and interdisciplinary collaborations.

I will use an investigation between the architect Alison Killing, the journalist Megha Rajagopalan and me, where we looked for unknown internment camps in China’s region of Xinjiang, as a case study. These camps hold people from ethnic and religious minorities, largely the Uyghurs. We built custom software to combine the systematic detection of censorship on Baidu Maps with architectural analysis of satellite imagery and added personal narratives from former inmates. Based on our methodology, we were able to classify hundreds of previously unknown camps.

Conversation on Computational Activism

Q&A and discussion on Computational Activism hosted by Adnan Hadzi.