Technoecologies of Borders : Thinking with Borders as Multispecies Matters of Care

Josef Barla and Christoph Hubatschke introduce the article by stating that borders and technologies have always belonged together although “their form and function has historically changed” (p. 395). In our current “control societies” (ibid.) technologically enhanced border controls e.g. via biometric passports and other digital barriers have become a normality. This has gone so far as “these technologies and technoscientific practices further relocate physical borders deep into bodies, exercising surveillance from within” (ibid.). This entanglement of borders, (more-than-human) bodies and technologies is what the authors want to reflect in the article by referring to two empirical examples borders, refugees and ecologies in Austria and the UK (p. 399ff).
For their analysis, the authors combine Félix Guattari’s writings on ecology and Nira Yuval-Davies work on feminist transversal politics (p. 397ff).

Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989) serves as a starting point to reflect on the assemblage of environment, technologies, the social and the mental and to initiate their “technoecological reading of borders” (p. 397). This is especially present in the concept of “mechanosphere” developed by Guattari and Deleuze that describes “relationalities of heterogenous human and more-than-human forces and flows which constantly constitute and reconfigure one another” (ibid.). This perspective breaks with the idea of separated social and natural worlds.

In order to promote solidarity between heterogeneous actors that come together especially at borders, the authors engage with Nira Yuval-Davis “feminist transversal politics” that go beyond the idea of individualism and identity politics as it represent an “intersectional tool” that foregrounds the notion of “us” instead of “the other” (p. 397-398). Using this conceptual basis, the authors propose a reading of borders as “multispecies matters of care composed of and stabilised through entangled human and nonhuman bodies, technologies, geologies, politics and discourses” (p. 399).

The first empiric example is a case of 2016 that involves refugees in Austria and the statement of the minister of foreign affairs who proposed that while waiting for the results of their asylum cases, the refugees could do some (unpaid) work e.g. they could be “helping eradicating so called alien or invasive species – mainly plats – which are not native to domestic ecosystems” (p. 399). The authors analyze how discourses about invasive species were constructed over time and how they are in this case intertwined with discourses and politics of migration, xenophobia, racism and refugees (p. 400ff). They show how this discourse “enacts another border, one that differentiates life from death” (p. 401) and how this connects to hegemonic power relations and questions of nativity and belonging.

The second example cites the controversy about “nationality swapping” in the UK around 2009 and the Human Provenance Pilot Project that was launched and run by the UK Border Agency from 2009 to 2011 (p. 403). The project should find out the supposedly ‘real’ nationality of the (male) asylum seekers, especially from Africa. For this purpose, the project combined different biotechnological analysis like DNA testing, Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, single-nucleotide polymorphism and strontium isotope analysis (ibid.). Strontium, a material that is part of rocks can make its way into human bodies (to be found in hair, nails, bones) via groundwater, plants and animals. Through this techniques, the geographical origin of asylum seekers should be revealed – the bodies themselves “embodied the border” (p. 404). The authors show, how this bordering project connected people and their environments in an uncompromising way that neglected the possibility of failure and made the mistake of equating geological and political territories as well as nativity and nationality (p. 404f).