Centre Research Seminar Series - Datafied Refuge: Digital Boundaries for a Life in Refuge

With smartphones to hand, many refugees today document their traversals and communicate with family scattered across the globe, creating and leaving data trails.

Once they reach an intermediary or final destination, biometric data is recorded in order to process visas or asylum documents, even to grant access to benefits schemes. As they enter new cultural and geographical contexts, refugees are subject to more data processing - as job seekers and housing applicants, or as users of civic tech for integration The workshop invites participants to take part in producing a set of easily accessible guidelines to ensure that the development of refugee centred technologies take a rights-based approach. 

Our panel:

Kira Allmann, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford
Matt Mahmoudi, PhD candidate in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge
Ella McPherson, Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of New Media and Digital Technology, University of Cambridge
Christopher Otieno Omolo, PhD candidate in Political Science at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany