Intimate infrastructure and mobility: between voluntary and coerced visibility”

Description

This talk explores the contradictions of visibility in digital and data driven media environment in the context of migrant mobility. While visibility is considered central for struggles of human rights and societal belonging, visibility, for people in marginal position, can also be a trap as famously argued by Peggy Phelan.

This talk takes as its departure the idea of digital technologies as intimate infrastructure (Wilson 2015) that profoundly organise and shape daily life. In current data driven, algorithmic digital environment also visibility takes form infrastructurally. The vulnerability produced by the traces left by data may be difficult to discern, and as Gangadharan (2012) points out the tracking personal data can create “non–transparent, asymmetric power relations between the profilers and profiled, in political, social, and economic contexts”.
I discuss the complications of digital and data driven visibility through two case studies: a participatory photographic exhibition and workshop with undocumented migrants in Finland and a case of social media videos shared in the context of human smuggling in Europe.
The case studies illustrate affective and haptic dimensions to visibility as well as the tensions between voluntary and coerced visibility with complications that may affect lives long in the future, as data shadows and echoes.

Period	20 Nov 2025
Held at	University of Tübingen, Germany
Degree of Recognition	International