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Your search keyword '"Cheesman, Margie"' showing total 4 results
Start Over Author "Cheesman, Margie" Publication Type Electronic Resources
4 results on '"Cheesman, Margie"'

1. Infrastructure justice and humanitarianism : blockchain's promises in practice

Author

Cheesman, Margie, Neff, Gina, Graham, Mark, and Wright, Joss

Subjects
Humanitarian aid workers, Refugees, Arab, Technology, Anthropology, Humanitarian assistance
Abstract

Proponents of the decentralised database technology blockchain suggest it will revolutionise the aid sector by allowing money and data to be exchanged more equitably, efficiently, transparently, and securely. Blockchain is widely expected to improve refugee identification, cross-border remittances, supply chain management and more. However, humanitarian blockchain projects are nascent and there is a lack of critical scholarship on how the promises for blockchain are playing out in practice. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically informed, empirically grounded case study of the use of blockchain in humanitarianism. I investigate the imaginaries, uses and effects of blockchain in anthropological terms, based on close-up work with the key stakeholder communities connected to a pilot project in Jordan's refugee camps, which in 2019 began using blockchain to deliver financial aid to Syrian refugee women. Drawing together a range of perspectives on the same project, I show how the aspirations for this new technology materialise, in support of some priorities-those of UN donors, agencies and their corporate and government partners-at the expense of others-aid workers and refugees. Building on critical data studies, infrastructure studies, and aid and migration studies, I put forward the theoretical frame of infrastructure justice. With this, I advance scholarship on socio-economic injustices and political hegemonies in the digital age. I argue that injustices are experienced, extended, and contested through three interlocking dimensions of infrastructure: subjectivities, timescapes, and materialities. I demonstrate how strongly affective cultural and subjective experiences with blockchain-involving suspicion, ignorance, mystification, and faith-connect with the asymmetrical regulation of information, material resources and strategic interests over space and time. This thesis gives fresh insight into how radical, emergent technology implemented at socio-economic margins both challenges and is incorporated into the structures of global governance, and in particular how it is experienced by its presumed beneficiaries.

Published
2022

2. Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

Author

Gillespie, Marie, Osseiran, Souad, Cheesman, Margie, Gillespie, Marie, Osseiran, Souad, and Cheesman, Margie

Abstract

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide.

3. Between surveillance and recognition: rethinking digital identity in aid

Author

Weitzberg, Keren, Cheesman, Margie, Martin, Aaron, Schoemaker, Emrys, Weitzberg, Keren, Cheesman, Margie, Martin, Aaron, and Schoemaker, Emrys

Abstract

Identification technologies like biometrics have long been associated with securitisation, coercion and surveillance but have also, in recent years, become constitutive of a politics of empowerment, particularly in contexts of international aid. Aid organisations tend to see digital identification technologies as tools of recognition and inclusion rather than oppressive forms of monitoring, tracking and top-down control. In addition, practices that many critical scholars describe as aiding surveillance are often experienced differently by humanitarian subjects. This commentary examines the fraught questions this raises for scholars of international aid, surveillance studies and critical data studies. We put forward a research agenda that tackles head-on how critical theories of data and society can better account for the ambivalent dynamics of ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ that digital aid interventions instantiate.

4. Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

Author

Gillespie, Marie, Osseiran, Souad, Cheesman, Margie, Gillespie, Marie, Osseiran, Souad, and Cheesman, Margie

Abstract

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide.

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