This paper analyzes how contemporary migration and border control in Germany and Europe functions through technologies that attempt to make migrants and geographies audible. Looking at the use of voice recognition technologies used in asylum administration as my primary case I interrogate processes through which sounding like being from a particular region warrants migrants’ claims to asylum requiring the translation of voices, dialects, narrative, and phonetics into geographical locations. Engaging with critical border and migration studies, feminist science and technology studies, and sound studies I ask: how is the voice is made measurable and commensurable to territoriality in the process of positioning it as a suitable medium of verification that ultimately functions as a technique of border control? What are the political, economic, and social conditions of possibility that produce information about migrant phonetics as a “true” reading of territorial belonging and citizenship? How is the use of voice recognition embedded within histories of German and European colonialism and the production of cultural difference? Combining ethnographic and historical research about the entanglements between bureaucratic form, the production of sonic knowledge, and data-driven technological control of migration I show that current discursive framings of migration as crisis in Europe make possible the proliferation of governmental techniques attempted to regulate what is framed as the racialized threat of autonomous human mobility. Further, I argue that the current proliferation of new data-driven, algorithmic sound technologies needs to be situated within colonial genealogies of producing racial and cultural difference that classify migrant voices and code them in racialized and gendered terms. In particular, I attend to the afterlife of colonial knowledge production to articulate a genealogy of racialization in Europe that emphasizes the continuities between colonialism and contemporary migration and focuses on the sensory and affective registers (in particular sound) through which bodies are captured. As such, it is paramount for feminist scholarship to attend to the affective, gendered, and racialized economies in which the sound technologies I analyze are embedded to scrutinize contemporary proliferations of technological capture of voices and their translation into territoriality.

Michelle Pfeifer is a doctoral student in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work examines the relationship between borders, technology, and affect. She is especially interested in the affective dimensions of biopolitical technologies in the context of migration, asylum, and borders and the transnational logics of citizenship and belonging. Her academic research is informed by her engagement in queer and feminist activism and migrant solidarity in Germany. She is currently conducting her dissertation research, which examines the role of sound and audibility as crucial sensory registers through which European nation-states regulate mobility, control borders, and administer migration. The dissertation traces the genealogy of sound production from German colonialism to contemporary migration and border control. Her work has been published in Citizenship Studies and the German journals for feminist sudies Femina Politica and Feministische Studien.

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Thank you for organizing this important and thought-provoking conference.