Processing Citizenship – Migration, Data, and European Governance

Catia Prandi

Last updated: 11.03.2025

How does migration enact Europe? This question can be answered legally and politically, as most policy makers, sociologists and journalists do. Or, it can be answered technically. How do data infrastructures and practices for foreign population management shape the European order, while they process Alterity?

Current migration waves are changing not only European policies, but also the way knowledge about individuals, institutions and space is produced. Interoperable data systems are key enablers of this knowledge. They crystallize security, humanitarian, administrative and technical dynamics that compete to define what “alterity”, “citizenship”, “state” and “Europe” are. This is the main insight of Processing Citizenship. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe, a five-year research program involving a team made of sociologists of technology, information scientists, ethnographers and political sociologists.

Thanks to the support of an ERC Starting Grant (2017-22), we are studying registration and identification of third-country nationals in Europe as socio-technical practices. Such practices challenge our established notions of “alterity”, “citizenship”, “state”, “Europe” and “territory”. This evidence raises pressing technical and crucial long-term issues.

Technically, migrant data circulation requires infrastructural standardization and integration among agencies at European, national and local levels. Gaps and misalignments in data collection, classification and circulation can lead to major drawbacks not only in the European migration regime, but also in European multi-level governance. Processing Citizenship (PC) studies such gaps and misalignments from the perspective of semantic interoperability and data quality.

At the same time, Processing Citizenship aims to develop a “history of the present” that accounts for contemporary material practices of registration and identification of Alterity as activities of long-term governance transformation. As historians of technology have shown, modern institutions like the nation-state are the result, not the cause, of efforts to handle information about populations and territory. The nation-state can be conceived of as the most powerful socio-technical machine for knowledge handling. More recently, European integration has been shown to be the result of multi-level and multi-sector activities of infrastructure building. As a consequence, we wonder which new orders of authority are emerging from contemporary European data infrastructures and practices for population management. In other words, Processing Citizenship investigates the infrastructural “re-making” of Europe, one of the most fundamental since the Treaty of Rome 60 years ago.

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Processing citizenship's script methodology
Processing citizenship's main objectives

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Processing citizenship's script methodology

Processing Citizenship adopts a script analysis methodology which compares on the one hand how knowledge about individuals is formalized in the information systems used for migration management by national and European authorities, and on the other hand the actual ontologies, reactions and identification practices deployed to "process alterity." Our method is inspired by the script-analysis approach developed by the earlier sociology of translation (Akrich and Latour 1992). While information system design is highly formalized, we are interested in investigating the situated, informal and alternative use of those systems.

The script analysis drafts a typology of “intended migrants” - i.e. migrant identities inscribed in information systems - and compares them along three different dimensions:

similarities and differences among diverse information systems' ontologies developed by Member States, European agencies and international organizations, and the ethical and cultural values that are embedded in such databases;
migrants’ reactions and practices accepting (“subscribing”) or resisting (“dis-inscribing”) those intended identities;
the actual practices carried out at the border by street-level officers.

Processing citizenship's main objectives

Processing Citizenship asks how data infrastructures and practices for foreign population management shape the Europan order while processing Alterity. To answer this overarching question, it pursues three interrelated main objectives.

To understand how migrants’ identities are shaped by registration and identification infrastructures and practices, and how migrants adapt or resist them. Drawing upon actor-network theory’s script approach, this objective articulates two sub-questions. On one hand, it focuses on which types of data about migrants are “inscribed” in information systems; on the other hand, it asks whether the expected bearers of those identities accept, mediate or refuse them.
To understand how institutional relationships (e.g., between Member States and Europe, authorities and contractors, humanitarian actors and international organizations) are shaped by data infrastructures and practices for alterity processing. Notably, this objective focuses on how institutional boundaries are challenged by data collection, processing, storage, matching, distribution, and how institutional identities are re-enacted. Furthermore and crucially, it asks whether new hybrid and multi-scalar orders of authority emerge.
To understand how modernist conceptualizations of space are challenged by data infrastructures for population management. As the contiguous Euclidean map has been replaced by non-contiguous media technologies, like the relational database, as the topologically organized medium of incipient forms of distributed authority, the Project asks how this is affecting the way we conceptualize the coupling of territory and population.

Catia Prandi Author at PC Ship

Ombretta Ingrasci Editor at PC Ship