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3.3 Re-Appropriating Technologies with and for Refugees and Migrants
243 Plays8 months ago
Smartphones, food-only debit cards, biometric data checks at border crossings, these are some of the ways refugees and migrants interact with technology in their daily lives both in the region and the diaspora.
This episode unpacks the benefits, ambivalences and concerns surrounding these technologies. Our guests, Dr Reem Talhouk and Dr Yener Bayramoğlu discuss refugee-centered design technologies for humanitarian aid, as well as smartphone usage amongst refugees and migrants and how it has given them control over their own lives and narratives as they cross borders.
Reem Talhouk is an Assistant Professor in Design and Global Develpment at Northumbria University where she co-leads the Design Feminisms Research Group. Reem also leads the Global Development Futures Hub. Her work sits within design, and human and computer interaction. Reem works with communities considered to be ‘on the margins’ to design technologies and counter-narratives with a focus on humanitarianism, activism and social movements.
Yener Bayramoglu is Assistant Professor in Digital Media at York University. His current research explores the role of digital media in everyday practices of belonging. Yener is particularly interested in the ambivalent meaning and function of digital media for social groups whose lives are marginalised and shaped by intersectional inequalities. Yener has previously explored how digital media technologies turn into self-empowering tools for migrants, refugees and LGBTIQ+ people.
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Transcript
Exploring Technological Developments Beyond AI Innovations
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Season 3 of Instant Coffee. I'm Nadine Almanasvi. And I'm Sima Shehad. And this latest season is an exploration of technology and its development in the region.
Historical and Modern Tech in Middle Eastern Contexts
00:00:14
Speaker
Beyond the emergence of Chuck GPT and Sophia the Robot, we wanted to speak with people who are applying, adapting and reimagining technology in their fields. We will be exposed to medieval Islamic hospitals, failed Gulf techno-cities, emerging Iraqi fintech startups, inclusive artificial intelligence and much more.
Tech for Refugees: Insights from Experts
00:00:33
Speaker
This episode explores how technology has been used by and for refugees and migrants both in the region and in the diaspora. We unpack technology's ambivalences to quote one of our guests, Yener Bayramulu, and talk through what agency looks like in relation to humanitarian aid and media technologies.
Participatory Design with Marginalized Communities
00:00:51
Speaker
Our first guest, Reem Talhuk, is an assistant professor in design and global development at Northumbria University.
00:00:59
Speaker
I'm Reem. I am from Lebanon. I'm an assistant professor in design and global development at Northumbria University, where I also co-lead the Design Feminisms Research Group and lead the Global Development Futures Hub. Most of my work sits within design and human computer interaction. And what I do mostly is work with communities that are considered to be on the margins.
00:01:28
Speaker
to design technologies and counter narratives with a focus on humanitarianism, as well as activism and social movements. Most of my work has been in the MENA region, home, and so I always find myself going back to it, both with my work and my emotions, feelings, and thoughts.
Critiquing Humanitarian Tech Systems
00:01:50
Speaker
Thanks for that intro, Reem. Can you tell us a bit more about design technology and also walk us through your approach to design technology in the context of humanitarian aid?
00:02:00
Speaker
my approach, and I think because I come at design also from a research perspective, what I mostly use is participatory design with refugees and communities. So rather than starting from the needs assessments and the humanitarian systems, I start with and from the refugee communities. And so what we do is we design
00:02:23
Speaker
technologies that kind of fulfill their visions of how they view humanitarian technologies. And in doing so, what we also generate is these critiques of existing technologies, because what we show is how these technologies can be designed and configured otherwise in a way that gives refugees more agency in how they want to use these technologies and why they want to use them or even if they don't want to use them.
00:02:51
Speaker
And so participatory design lets you do that, especially because what I use is participatory design with a capital P, with the P signifying and acknowledging that technologies are political and that the way we design technologies in itself is political. And so that's how we generate the research knowledge and the counter narratives through the design process. And why did you feel the need to pivot away from the mainstream approaches? What was wrong with them?
00:03:19
Speaker
I think it's mainstream technology in the humanitarian setting, but also situated in this wider context of how the humanitarian system works. There's been a lot of research surrounding the IKEA shelters, Pompina, how a lot of times in acute crises, humanitarian systems are configured towards efficient, effective, quick aid as quickly as possible.
Efficiency vs. Refugee Needs in Humanitarian Tech
00:03:43
Speaker
But once you're in a protracted situation, what we really need to be asking ourselves is, well, how do our technologies create spaces for freedoms, for capabilities, for resilience, for dignity? And so I think the issue that we have is that the humanitarian system, and in turn then the technologies that come out of it, are very much geared towards right. We need to be as efficient as possible.
00:04:09
Speaker
And efficiency is good, but not on the long run when we're working towards shifting objectives, shifting social and political objectives, where we need to slow down and think of, well, how are we creating spaces for refugees to come together, take action and have a voice? And so can you give us some examples of how the humanitarian aid system as it stands is currently failing refugees?
00:04:35
Speaker
The example that I always go back to, and I think because that one is like the clearest one, is the World Food Program's eVoucher system. It gives refugees like debit cards per household, right? That they can use to only buy food. The fact that they can only buy food with it is because it's more of a funder prerogative to say, well, I only want my aid to be used for food and not for use for other things. So I think there's a whole other debate about cash assistance versus non-cash assistance and so on.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so when I worked with Syrian refugees in the Bika Valley, they were saying, well, one, we need to sometimes purchase non-food items. That was like a clear thing. But also they were questioning, well, why is it that it's given to us per household? We want to, as a community, buy in bulk.
00:05:24
Speaker
and benefit from the discounts of that. And our eVoucher systems don't really, it's not easy to do that, right? It's not easy for us to pool everything that we have together.
Refugee-Centered Design Challenges
00:05:34
Speaker
And so that shows like this clear disconnect between what the technology enables for humanitarian organizations and then in doing that what it disables refugees to do. Margaret Cheesman has done a lot of work as well on
00:05:48
Speaker
digital wallets in Zaatari Camp in Jordan. Her and the refugees she was working with pointed to is that a lot of the refugees don't know how much money they have in these accounts because they don't have access to them in a way that you and I have access to our bank accounts. And so you can see how those disconnects take away those powers and capabilities from refugees to use the technologies and the aid in the way that they want to use them.
00:06:17
Speaker
And so how can we understand the objectives of these mainstream humanitarian aid systems if, as you say, the refugee doesn't seem to be centered in their design? So I think here it's important to have a bit of an overview of these mainstream approaches. So when humanitarian innovation
00:06:33
Speaker
specifically technological innovation kind of became a thing. What we saw is that humanitarian organizations partnered with these private design companies such as IDEO and also technology organizations, Facebook, Google, you name it. And they adopted this user-centered approach. And user-centered approach for designing technologies comes from a very consumerist and commercial stemming. So it's about designing a technology so that it is usable so that people buy it.
00:07:03
Speaker
And that has a lot of connotations with it. And then we saw a shift towards human-centered design. Human-centered design says, well, people aren't just users. They're humans with motivations, aspirations. And also, our individuals are contending with the social, political, and economic challenges that we all are facing in many ways. So that was the second shift. And then we're now seeing a small, slight nudge towards refugee-centered design.
00:07:31
Speaker
where it tries to account for experiences of displacement, refugees and kind of tries to work with an understanding of the humanitarian system. I think in the mainstream approaches, it's important to kind of remember that yes, refugees are sometimes the end users, right? They're the ones that are going to be using those technologies, but they're not the people paying for them. It's the funders that are paying for them. So it creates a quasi market
00:07:57
Speaker
where a lot of the humanitarian organizations that are doing technological innovation are contending with these competing demands, right? So demands for accountability is a lot of the reason why we have refugee ID registration, biometric registration, right? It's because funders were like, well, we want to know that our aid is going to the people, even though the data shows that there's not a lot of loss
00:08:21
Speaker
in terms on the beneficiary end, it's further up in the supply chain that aid is monitoring is being lost. And so by instead situating myself and my work within refugee communities, it starts with, well, what do the refugees and the communities, what do they want? And how do they want to use these technologies? And then we work our way back to, right, how do we then fulfill a bit of what?
00:08:45
Speaker
the other stakeholders want.
Empowerment Through Digital Media
00:08:47
Speaker
And it's just that simple shift of starting point that makes all the difference.
00:08:53
Speaker
Reappropriation of technology to center and start with the people who are going to be using the technology, in Liam's case, refugees, is one dimension of the conversation. But understanding the way people actually take control of the technology themselves is another approach we wanted to explore in this episode. Yannar Bairamulu, assistant professor in digital media at York University, talks us through this approach in relation to migrant and refugee communities.
00:09:18
Speaker
I think it's very important to document the inequalities, but there is also the danger that that kind of interest reproduces this typical understanding of migrants as always suffering subjects, but never as
00:09:33
Speaker
political subjects with agency, raising their voices against global inequality. So we rarely hear that kind of stories in the scholarship, but also in general public discussions or in mainstream media.
00:09:49
Speaker
So that's why my interest in digital media emerged, because if you want to look at what migrants do against racism or against the current border regimes, you
Refugees Shaping Narratives and Community Connections
00:10:05
Speaker
end up inevitably exploring digital media because migrants and diasporic subjects, they quite often use these different technologies to raise their voices, to document their stories and to create new form of visualities and narratives so they become a political subject. This was the reason why I ended up basically looking at digital media and its meaning for migrants.
00:10:33
Speaker
Thank you for that. So it is quite similar to Reem, who we spoke with earlier, in that you are carving out a different way of understanding media studies in relation to refugees and migrants.
00:10:44
Speaker
My research interests are based mostly on media and communication. I try to understand what role, particularly digital media, but also different media formats play, for instance, for migrants, but also for different vulnerable groups and minorities. So in that sense, I do more critical media and communication studies.
00:11:09
Speaker
I try to understand what kind of inequalities exist in societies and how these inequalities are interlinked with different media and communication infrastructures. Can I ask what it would look like when these vulnerable communities do take control of the documentation of their lives through technology?
00:11:31
Speaker
Well, in order to understand that, maybe we could first talk about, you know, what kind of representations are circulated in general public or in mainstream media. You know, when we look at the media representations of migrants or refugees crossing borders, we always see this dualism. They either are represented as danger for European orders, social and economic order.
00:11:57
Speaker
or they are seen as a victim of a humanitarian catastrophe. When we think about refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, one particular image would always come up in our minds. When we shift our attention away from this very loud and bold
00:12:16
Speaker
media representations to those ones created by migrants we see different kind of narratives. So migrants use their smartphones for instance to document their own journey. When they cross Mediterranean Sea they document their
00:12:32
Speaker
a journey and we see in these videos a different kind of narrative. We see, for instance, migrants basically celebrating and singing and even sunbathing or watching the dolphins when they cross the Mediterranean Sea
00:12:49
Speaker
or when they arrive in the European continent, they basically celebrate this because despite all the European border policies, they managed to arrive in Europe. So this is clearly a reason to celebrate. And we don't see these kind of images, for instance, in media, because
00:13:09
Speaker
They do not fit typical humanitarian understanding because all those NGOs and charity organizations, they need actually images of migrants suffering. But they also trouble the border policies because nations and supranational institutions such as European Union do not want to see that borders are transcended, are easily transcended.
00:13:36
Speaker
Migrants also use smartphones to document illegal acts, such as the pushbacks. We saw, for instance, you know, we always see these kind of videos done by migrants, how, for instance, Greek border patrols should fire on rubber boats. Like we saw also videos done by migrants crossing the border between Turkey and Bulgaria, how Bulgarian police attacked
00:14:01
Speaker
by, you know, shooting fire. So they document also this kind of illegal acts. And these videos later on get also circulated in the mainstream media. So the journalists use these kind of videos to shift their attention to the illegal pushbacks. So this kind of visual does not only stay on social media platforms, but they also become later on part of mainstream media, such as news reports.
00:14:31
Speaker
And part of your work also looks at LGBTQI refugees. Is there ever a fear from these communities about the dangers of technology or of being overly documented, even if they are the ones doing the documentation?
00:14:46
Speaker
Yes, this is also very interesting because this is a story that is rarely documented and we know, particularly when we talk about, for instance, the history of queer migration, we don't have any documents in the archives. And in recent years, particularly in Germany, queer migrants started using these technologies to document and create new archives about queer migration history.
00:15:11
Speaker
I took part actually in one of these kind of projects which was called Muddy Ancestors, which was based on conducting oral history with queer migrants to, you know, document the history of pre-migration, which is also a completely new narrative and new stories. In academic discussions, for instance, in queer theoretical discussions, queerness is always understood as ephemeral, you know, it's like momentary, it comes and goes, it's very difficult to
00:15:40
Speaker
And then suddenly I witnessed that kind of a moment. This person wanted to be actually momentary ephemeral and was against documenting this.
00:15:56
Speaker
You know, when you document, it's not only about, you know, you leave a trace for the entire history, but there's also, you know, all these technologies, they have an ambivalent meaning because they're part of the surveillance, capitalism, you know, all the data are collected and archived.
00:16:14
Speaker
In that sense, we should be always also careful before romanticizing the digital technologies, because unfortunately, it's not a moral, there's, you know, anarchist times when they were all thinking internet will be this utopian place. And we know that also, you know, nations, they increasingly are using digital technologies to track and collect data of migrants and people crossing the borders.
00:16:43
Speaker
So we've spoken quite a bit about how when refugees and migrants take control of technology, when they utilise smartphones and document their lives, we've looked at the effect this has had on media narratives and the external world to them. But maybe we can talk a bit more about the effect it's having on themselves and this idea of, or this theory of affect that you use.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yes, but before that I would like to add one more thing about smartphone. There is a really exciting book written by Paul Gilroy. Paul Gilroy talks about, in his book The Black Atlantic, talks about how gramophone created a formation of black diaspora on two sides of the Atlantic.
00:17:29
Speaker
So gramophone basically functioned as this infrastructure that helped creating a distinct diasporic culture and distinct diasporic belonging and sense of belonging to a community in these two sides of the Atlantic.
00:17:46
Speaker
And I think a similar thing is happening now with particularly the new generation of migrants through smartphone. So there is a smart, I would say, a smartphone diaspora. Smartphone is functioning as this infrastructure that helps migrants to get integrated, but also create a new form of culture and create a new form of community
00:18:08
Speaker
in places such as London and Berlin. It's very important to talk about ambivalences but also not to forget very bold meaning of these technologies for diaspora formation. Thank you for that because that was actually really interesting and I think it ties really well into this question about affect and how smartphone technology is transforming migrants and refugees in the diaspora themselves.
00:18:33
Speaker
You know, I talked in the beginning about all these videos created by refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea. They have also a very important effective meaning because they are not trying to trigger emotions such as fear or panic
00:18:52
Speaker
or empathy, which is always the case in mainstream media, you know, when they talk about borders and refugees, all these videos show emotions such as, you know, happiness and joy. If you shift your attention away from mainstream media to this kind of visuality narrative created by smartphones and digital media, you end up seeing these kind of emotions.
00:19:16
Speaker
And also maybe it would be interesting to talk about also hope and hopelessness because when I was doing my fieldwork in Berlin I was also conducting interviews and it was right before the Turkish elections. You could observe a sense of hope
00:19:35
Speaker
People were very hopeful that the government will change and situation the LGBT issues and the repression of the LGBTIQ will end in Turkey. Many queer migrants that I interviewed, they even had the hope of going back to Turkey.
Impact of Digitalization on Refugee Surveillance
00:19:52
Speaker
And I would even say there was not only hope, but also a celebration as if Erdogan has already lost the election.
00:20:01
Speaker
everyone was like so sure that things will change and you could see right after the election there was a huge hopelessness and anger, a sense that not only during the interviews but also on all these you know Instagram posts and all this like online communication done by the migrant NGOs there was this you know sense of hopelessness and
00:20:24
Speaker
this realization that, you know, the situation might even worsen over the next years. From Riemann Janner's own research and experience working with these vulnerable communities, we wanted to ask them what they thought was needed to build more agent-centered and empowering systems.
00:20:43
Speaker
This is a really good question and also a question that I need to think about it. For instance, a border regime is increasingly becoming digitalized. I mentioned briefly about, you know, biometric cards and fingerprints.
00:21:01
Speaker
this is also not only becoming increasingly digitalized but also taken for granted you're basically forced to give all your data at the border and this is argued that otherwise it will be difficult to detect the person but this is
00:21:19
Speaker
very much entangled with racism and racialization.
Empowering Refugees Through Context-Respectful Tech
00:21:24
Speaker
Also, we are increasingly witnessing states demanding social media presence to see what you have done in the past.
00:21:35
Speaker
And so it becomes also part of the surveillance. And also when we think about LGBTQ refugees, this increase in digitalization is also forcing them to basically create a certain visibility in their platforms, social media platforms. So when they apply for asylum in the future, the institutions will see their queer presence. You know, social media becomes increasingly part of like a proof system.
00:22:02
Speaker
This is a problematic area that we need to think about. I think what we really need to be talking about is how do we break away from Western notions and designs of technologies and support technological innovation that speaks of and with our ways of engaging with the challenges that we have.
00:22:30
Speaker
And it's quite complex. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not, again, kind of reflecting back on Lebanon, where I'm from. It's hard to do that when you don't have electricity all the time. It's hard to do that when the internet is slow. I think the future is going to be really kind of contending with our infrastructural challenges that we have in the region, as well as diaspora feeding into kind of this re-envisioning of technologies within the region.
00:23:00
Speaker
reappropriation is brilliant. It means what you're doing is taking a technology that you didn't have it to invest that much money into the design of it and rework it for your purposes. But then it all depends on how open are these technologies for reappropriation. And so I think until we push towards asking for
00:23:20
Speaker
technology is to be used for us to act with rather than technologies being used to act upon us. We're still, we're going to be within this vicious cycle. So just looking at the technological trends of artificial intelligence, I think one of the things that we should be doing as technology designers in the region and researchers in the region is really asking, well,
00:23:43
Speaker
What does an Arabic Mina AI system look like? How does it look like and feel like, right? And not just in the language that it uses, but how do we use it to serve the purposes that we want? And rather than serve the purposes of the companies, the governments, and so on.
00:24:04
Speaker
Thank you to Reem and Jäner for speaking with us. Despite their research taking place in different contexts, they both centered the importance of ensuring refugees and migrants are given the technological tools to control their own paths and to collaborate as equals in thinking more long-term about future prospects both in the region and in the diaspora. To learn more about Reem and Jäner's work, follow the link in the podcast description. Join us every other Tuesday for a new episode of Instant Coffee.