Our Work

We are building key frameworks that will help us better analyse and understand the implications of our findings and design possible solution pathways and recommendations.

Digital negotiations in Student Migration : Infrastructures and impact

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Digital integrations across porous borders : Nepalese migrants in India

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Digital mediation & technologies in forced displacement : Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

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Technologies of Resistance : An emerging digital layer in human migration

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Taxonomising Resistance Technologies

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Migrant

A person who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons. The term includes a number of well-defined legal categories of people, such as migrant workers; persons whose particular types of movements are legally-defined, such as smuggled migrants; as well as those whose status or means of movement are not specifically defined under international law, such as international students. [1]

Refugee

Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder. Refugees have a right to international protection. [2]

Asylum Seeker

An asylum-seeker is someone who intends to seek or is awaiting a decision on their request for international protection. [3]

People on the move

This is a broad term without a legal definition, used to categorise people who are moving from one place to another for relatively long periods of time. However, it seeks to include people that are undertaking migratory journeys, but may not fall under the legal categories of ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’.[4]

Digital Systems / Digital Technologies

A range of tools, services, and devices that generate, store or process varied kinds of data.

Data Assemblage

Distinct supply chains of data (or set of supply chains) toward a particular end. The central concern of this concept is to create the production of a data that is intertwined with another assemblage to create a large amalgam of apparatuses with different sets of practices and relations within.[5]

Migration Data

Sources of migration data can be broadly grouped into two categories, traditional data (statistical and administrative data sources) that include national population and housing surveys, and administrative records of migrant flows; and non-traditional data (innovative data sources) fuelled by rapid technological advancement and an increasing amount of migration-related information is now available from the private sector in the form of ‘big data’.[6]

Digital Infrastructure

Interconnected digital systems or technologies that consist of components such as data assemblages, cloud, hardware, standards and protocol form digital infrastructure. These share certain core characteristics such as being necessary to system functioning, addressing societal needs, facilitating further production, collecting data and linking multiple components. [7]

Digital Migration Infrastructure

The interconnected digital systems or technologies that facilitate migration processes. These are leveraged in ways that inform and shape migration and resettlement patterns in migration. They are being increasingly used in decision-making in migration management.[8]

Migrant Rights

These refer to the rights of migrants that are implicitly or explicitly set by international migration law, including international human rights and other public law instruments. A rights-based approach acknowledges that the rights of migrants are granted not only by  human rights law but also by treaties from other branches of international public law.[9]

Data Principal or Subject

As defined by the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 a data subject means any identifiable natural person. An identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

Data Rights

Digital rights are those rights that allow people to access, use, create and publish digital media, as well as access and use computers, other electronic devices and communications networks.[10]

Data Stewardship

Data Stewardship is a governance paradigm that centres individuals and communities in the collection, usage, and sharing of data. This approach aims to empower these stakeholders by providing frameworks and best practices that facilitate their participation in the data economy.[11]

Data Governance

Data Governance is a system of decision, rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods. (it acts as a basis/conduit for data rights)

Data Justice

Data Justice is an evolving school of thought drawing from frameworks and discourse around equitable access to data and the rights of individuals and communities in the data economy. It focuses on fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data.[12]

Data Solidarity

Data solidarity is an approach that seeks to achieve a more equitable sharing of benefits and risks emerging from digital practices. Moreover, not only individual people, but also communities and other collectives need to be able to exercise meaningful control over how data is used, by whom and for whose benefit.[13]

Mixed Migration

The term seeks to capture the intertwined and multifaceted drivers of movement of all people, regardless of status. A mixed migration lens helps to enlarge the protection space for people on the move who may not qualify for refugee status, or may not have left their countries for reasons laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention, or regional refugee instruments, but who still might have felt compelled to leave for a combination of interrelated factors, including economic, political, social and religious or ethnic ones.[14]

Migration Management

This refers to the planned approach to the development of policy, legislative and administrative responses to key migration issues.[15]

It involves numerous governmental, multilateral, and non-governmental agencies that create systems for managing various processes in migration, particularly the entry and presence of foreigners within a state and the protection of refugees, among others.

ResTech

The term ‘Resistance Technology’, or ResTech, aims to define a digital layer in the migration sphere that is characterised as community-led, built to fill gaps in information, welfare, and development, and can act as a resistance system through bottom-up friction, thereby enabling negotiating power for people on the move.[16]

Socio-technical Stages of Migration

These stages refer to a grouping of technological design and governance characteristics witnessed in migration, corresponding or responding to changing on-ground needs.

Crisis This is usually the primary stage of migration that can generate population movements within or outside the borders of a country. This may occur suddenly or gradually, and often lead to considerable vulnerabilities for affected people and communities. This poses serious migration management challenges as conditions for social integration within a new country are nascent, with limited technological infrastructure, policy and regulation.

Development A stage of migration in between crisis and integration, where states and international actors are actively involved in the management of people on the move, but with limited policies, regulation or infrastructure to help them navigate the social, economic, political needs of people on the move, and govern the technological landscape of the host country.

Integration The two-way process of mutual adaptation between migrants and the societies in which they live, whereby migrants are incorporated into the social, economic, cultural and political life of the receiving community. It entails a set of joint responsibilities for migrants and communities, and incorporates other related notions such as social inclusion and social cohesion.

Our Work

Digital negotiations in Student Migration : Infrastructures and impact

Digital integrations across porous borders : Nepalese migrants in India

Digital mediation & technologies in forced displacement : Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

Technologies of Resistance : An emerging digital layer in human migration

Taxonomising Resistance Technologies

Migrant

Refugee

Asylum Seeker

People on the move

Glossary