Automation, Biocrats, and Imaginaries in Biometric Border Worlds: A Commentary

Abstract

ABSTRACT This commentary reflects on the special issue on ethnographic approaches to biometric technologies. By attending to everyday experiences and understandings of the production, use, and contestation of biometric border technologies, the articles show how they are enmeshed in much wider social and cultural networks than is often presumed. I draw out three themes from the articles: automation, biometric bureaucrats (here glossed as ‘biocrats’), and imaginaries. While biometric technologies are often presented as automatic, they regularly fail. And though their automation may seem to shift questions of responsibility, they equally structure ways in which situated actors understand and act around issues of responsibility. While biometric border technologies are commonly seen to be aimed exclusively at the bodies of migrants, the bodies of biocrats are also fundamentally implicated. Lastly, while biometric technologies are presented as dealing with bodily characteristics based on science and rationality, they also relate to social and cultural imaginaries.