How do digital infrastructures regulate migration and the lives of those who cross borders? And how do digital media shape imaginaries of transnational mobility as a crisis and of migrants as people who need to be feared or pittied? In this talk, we discuss the growing technologization of the border and its communicative and political implications. Specifically, we speak to the emergence of the digital border, and show how technologies of communication and control now enable the realisation of borders as perpetual territorial and symbolic systems that divide Us/Them and inside/outside. While drawing on empirical insights from across Europe, collected over five-years’ research (2015-2020), we argue for a holistic approach to communication and migration that recognises how intersecting technologies and imaginaries of transnational mobility turn the border into a multi-nodal site of platforms, actors, connections, voices and values.
