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Panel abstract

Law regulates access to categories of residence, mobility, and social rights, and thus fundamentally shapes the experiences and living conditions of people on the move. At the same time, legal infrastructures and determinations regulating mobility and residence are increasingly informed by extra-legal expertise, such as medical, forensic, and biometric knowledge. The entanglements and co-workings of law and extra-legal expertise are particularly present in asylum adjudication, due to the combination of a difficult evidentiary situation and a “climate of suspicion” surrounding the category of asylum seekers. Increasingly decision-makers rely on expert knowledge to generate evidence about asylum seekers’ identities, health and conditions in their countries of origin. Novel forms of expertise, such as automated facial recognition and speech biometrics, are used alongside “traditional” forms such as country-of-origin information (COI), identity documents and medical expertise. Underlying all these practices, however, is a desire to make the decision-making process less insecure and more “objective.” Yet expert knowledge is increasingly contested inside and outside court rooms, leaving, perhaps even amplifying, room for discretion for decision-makers.

In this workshop we welcome papers that explore the contentious relationship(s) between migration law and expert knowledge both inside and outside the courtroom, and trace how various actors navigate these spaces of uncertainty and risk. We call for papers, empirical and/or conceptual, that touch upon some of these sets of questions (but not limited to):

• What does it mean as migration scholars to take law seriously as an object of study? How do we analytically and methodologically approach law when seeking to explore legal (technical) expertise and knowledge practices? In the encounters between “us” and the knowledge practices we strive to understand, what causes tension, friction and even contestation? How do we deal with these epistemological (even ontological) frictions (or not)? (researcher-law-relations)
• How do law and (other forms of) expert knowledge mutually inform and influence each other in local contexts of decision-making? How does expert knowledge travel in legal spaces and through which practices of translation? (Law-expertise relations)
• How are “high” (e.g. biometrics) and “low” (e.g. documents) tech, machinic (e.g. algorithmic and x-ray) and human vision (e.g. experts, judges, witnesses) used to make bodies and places known and “objective”? (Evidence-relations)
• What does the co-existence of novel and traditional ways of seeing and knowing tell us about hierarchies of knowledge in society at large? (legal knowledge-societal knowledge relations)