New publication

My latest article, co-authored with Vasilis Argyriou, has now been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. In the paper, titled “‘Migrant data can never be accurate’: Studying migration and borders through the notion of data quality“, we argue that contemporary migration and border governance cannot be properly understood without examining how data about migrants are actually made and stablized in practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece’s Closed Controlled Access Centres, we show how seemingly technical notions of “data quality” are in fact shaped by messy socio-technical work that needs to navigate language barriers and institutional frictions, exhausted and injured bodies that resist biometric capture, and ageing, non-interoperable databases that constrain what can be recorded. What counts as “good enough” data in this context then emerges through practical negotiations among frontline officers, interpreters, IT staff, and policymakers who seek to render uncertain information actionable under pressure.