05
Jan 2018
Stephan Scheel
Stephan Scheel is a post-doctoral researcher on the Processing Citizenship project. His research interests lie at the intersection of border and migration studies, citizenship studies, critical security studies as well as science and technology studies. In the Processing Citizenship project Stephan will primarily focus on how migrants experience registration in biometric databases at the ‘hotspots’. Stephan has a special expertise on biometric border controls. This is reflected by Stephan’s doctoral thesis that he defended in November 2014 at the Open University in Milton Keynes (UK) and which has been awarded the Michael Nicholson Thesis prize 2015 of the British International Studies Association (BISA). In brief, Stephan’s thesis investigates how migrants appropriate mobility to Europe via visa despite of biometric border controls.
Before joining the Processing Citizenship project, Stephan has been working on the ERC-funded project ‘ARITHMUS – How Data Make a People’ at Goldsmiths, University of London. In context of ARITHMUS Stephan has been working on the role of digital devices in the politics of methods, new methods in migration statistics like the usage of mobile positioning data, the performative power of statistical identity categories in processes of group formation and, finally, statistical algorithms that are used to determine the target population that is to be known.
In the Processing Citizenship project Stephan will primarily focus on how migrants experience registration in biometric databases at the ‘hotspots’. So far, Stephan has published his research in various book chapters and research articles in leading international journals, including Cultural Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, Migration Studies, Movements – Journal for Critical Border and Migration Studies and Post-colonial Studies.
In addition, Stephan is currently preparing his first book ‘Autonomy of Migration? Appropriating Mobility within Biometric Border Regimes’ which will be published by Routledge in 2018.