Migration management and the digitalization of legal-bureaucratic processes in Germany
Dr. Timm Sureau
In the context of the research project “Sentiments of Bureaucracies: Affective Dynamics in the Digital Transformation of German Immigration Management”, I will ethnographically trace how German bureaucracy for managing migration is digitizing their administration. We understand administrative programs similar to infrastructure, which undergoes a process of black boxing, and can best be analyzed while breaking and while being constructed or programmed. And this process of infrastructuring is happening right now. It is thus a unique moment to look at the intricacies at the crossroads of efficient on the one side, and legal duties of bureaucracies on the other. Germany’s agency for the management of migration is additionally under public scrutiny while dealing with the apparently crucial questions of identity, that is the question who is in and who is out. In the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), for example, they are currently not only developing new applications and system extensions, but also use new forms of work organisation such as methods of agile software development in which IT developers and bureaucrats work closely together. The central question is thus how bureaucratic sentiments are developed and transformed through new work contexts and techniques, how bureaucratic sentiments are inscribed in the developed technologies and disseminated within the agency.
Duration
2019 - 2023
Funding
Subproject in the SFB 1171 "Affective Societies" of the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Mentoring
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker