Security Flows
Aims
Enacting border security in the digital age: political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’ (SECURITY FLOWS) is a five-year Consolidator Grant funded by the European Research Council. The project proposes to analyse how datafication, the process of transforming our everyday lives into quantifiable digital data, is also transforming borders today. The project develops a novel interdisciplinary framework to understand how data is generated, exchanged and contested in border encounters, and to investigate the complex epistemic, practical, political and ethical implications of these transformations.
Methods
Tracing the production of data forms, flows and frictions, Security Flows will shed light on how data forms make things intelligible or unintelligible, and how digital data flows and frictions redistribute knowledge and ignorance among border security actors, NGOs and irregular migrants.
The project will also devise a multi-modal methodology for 'following the data' along migration routes. Politically, the project investigates how data reconfigures the worlds of actors involved in the governance of border security by enacting new power relations between these actors and reshaping decision-making. Finally, it will inquire into how data protection and the rights of both citizens and non-citizens are transformed by datafication.
Technology and Global Politics Reading Group
Technology is entangled in multiple ways with global politics, neither fully determined by power not simply determining possibilities of action. The reading group explores vocabularies, methods and approaches to study these entanglements through collaborative discussion. It meets monthly at King's to discuss seminal books around these issues. Previous readings have included Ruha Benjamin’s 'Race after Technology', Donna Haraway’s 'Simians, Cyborgs, and Women', and Slava Gerovitch’s 'From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. A History of Soviet Cybernetics.' Join the mailing list and participate in the reading group, please email claudia.aradau@kcl.ac.uk with a statement of your interest.
Publications
Recent publications by the project team:
Biopolitics Multiple: Migration, Extraction, Subtraction
Acts of digital parasitism: Hacking, humanitarian apps and platformisation
News
War Studies research associate receives Turing Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award
Ana Valdivia will analyse the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), social justice and climate change.

Technology and Global Politics Reading Group
Technology is entangled in multiple ways with global politics, neither fully determined by power not simply determining possibilities of action. The reading group explores vocabularies, methods and approaches to study these entanglements through collaborative discussion. It meets monthly at King's to discuss seminal books around these issues. Previous readings have included Ruha Benjamin’s 'Race after Technology', Donna Haraway’s 'Simians, Cyborgs, and Women', and Slava Gerovitch’s 'From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. A History of Soviet Cybernetics.' Join the mailing list and participate in the reading group, please email claudia.aradau@kcl.ac.uk with a statement of your interest.
Publications
Recent publications by the project team:
Biopolitics Multiple: Migration, Extraction, Subtraction
Acts of digital parasitism: Hacking, humanitarian apps and platformisation
News
War Studies research associate receives Turing Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award
Ana Valdivia will analyse the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), social justice and climate change.


Principal Investigator
Claudia Aradau
Professor of International Politics