Double session with 1) Qazale Hosseini, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Tehran; and 2) Natalie Welfens, Senior Researcher at the Center for Critical Computational Studies, University of Frankfurt, and Derya Ozkul, Associate Professor and the Co-Director of the Social Theory Centre at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick.

Online | 3:00-5:00 PM (CET) | Registration form will be made available in due course.

1) Iranian Digital Nomadism, Digital Identities (DI) and laborer organization
This paper proposes the concept of algorithmic agency as a lens for analysing how agency is redistributed in algorithmically mediated border governance. Rather than treating automation as a zero-sum substitution of human judgment by machine decision-making, we conceptualise agency as socio-technical, distributed, and co-produced across heterogeneous actors, infrastructures and practices. Building on critical data studies and STS-inspired scholarship on digital border governance, alongside relational approaches to agency in migration studies, the paper engages interdisciplinary debates on digital and algorithmic agency from the education sciences and intersectional feminist scholarship. These debates foreground actors’ uneven capacities to understand, navigate, and participate in digitally mediated environments. Bringing these literatures into dialogue enables us to complement and move beyond algorithmic fairness or algorithmic violence framings to trace how classifications are enacted, how discretion is redistributed, and how accountability is reconfigured within algorithmic border governance. We propose algorithmic agency as a heuristic concept that recalibrates empirical attention across interconnected phases of algorithmic border governance: the design and piloting of technologies, their use in everyday decision-making, and engagement with their outcomes, including possibilities for contestation and redress. Across these phases, algorithmic agency highlights how designers imagine and inscribe architectures; how algorithms classify, rank, and flag data; how frontline workers translate, contextualise, authorise, or reject algorithmic outputs; and how migrants comply with, anticipate, or contest opaque decisions under conditions of asymmetrical epistemic and institutional power. By centring algorithmic agency, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on digital borders by offering a vocabulary to analyse how power, knowledge, and discretion are reconfigured in algorithmic governance, without reducing agency to either technological determinism or heroic resistance.

2) Algorithmic agency
This paper proposes the concept of algorithmic agency as a lens for analysing how agency is redistributed in algorithmically mediated border governance. Rather than treating automation as a zero-sum substitution of human judgment by machine decision-making, we conceptualise agency as socio-technical, distributed, and co-produced across heterogeneous actors, infrastructures and practices. Building on critical data studies and STS-inspired scholarship on digital border governance, alongside relational approaches to agency in migration studies, the paper engages interdisciplinary debates on digital and algorithmic agency from the education sciences and intersectional feminist scholarship. These debates foreground actors’ uneven capacities to understand, navigate, and participate in digitally mediated environments. Bringing these literatures into dialogue enables us to complement and move beyond algorithmic fairness or algorithmic violence framings to trace how classifications are enacted, how discretion is redistributed, and how accountability is reconfigured within algorithmic border governance. We propose algorithmic agency as a heuristic concept that recalibrates empirical attention across interconnected phases of algorithmic border governance: the design and piloting of technologies, their use in everyday decision-making, and engagement with their outcomes, including possibilities for contestation and redress. Across these phases, algorithmic agency highlights how designers imagine and inscribe architectures; how algorithms classify, rank, and flag data; how frontline workers translate, contextualise, authorise, or reject algorithmic outputs; and how migrants comply with, anticipate, or contest opaque decisions under conditions of asymmetrical epistemic and institutional power. By centring algorithmic agency, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on digital borders by offering a vocabulary to analyse how power, knowledge, and discretion are reconfigured in algorithmic governance, without reducing agency to either technological determinism or heroic resistance.