November turned into a busy month between classes and my own projects. Outside of these, much of what I wrestled with involved pivoting away from what I had initially thought I was focusing on (as mentioned in my Week 6-7 post) and going back to the drawing board. My Migration and Forced Displacement Intensive was incredibly helpful in pushing me toward this position, as did my posts from earlier weeks. Migration and, in particular, the current trend we’re living through where powers that be are strongly driven to control it is fascinating to me and something I have repeatedly attempted to revisit in past weeks. It’s a huge topic, though, and one that feels heavily covered in a lot of ways.

It was in this state that I went into a cohort meeting about the final projects. In that meeting, Janel brought up an excellent point that was echoed by JB, namely that a Master’s project doesn’t necessarily involve breaking new ground. It can involve finding a work that you like and “rotating” it with some different variable (like a different population, for example). I loved this description, and it’s giving me a different way of vetting my project possibilities.

The following week I had a further conversation with JB, which I also found really helpful as he pointed me to some things to consider and someone to talk to.  I had fallen into this interesting pile of papers related to disinformation campaigns and migrants, which I thought could be interesting. I took copious notes and then put them aside to work on my final paper for Migration and Forced Displacement.

For that paper, I was looking at the US government’s detention and surveillance of migrants, particularly irregular migrants. While digging into government data for that, I stumbled across a mention of a small city in Texas that caught my eye. The US government has outsourced an electronic surveillance program that tracks the location of migrants enrolled in it to the subsidiary of a private prison company. It’s a massive program with some 340,000 people enrolled in it. The data published by the government (and collected by the company) breaks down the enrollees by city. Most of these tend to be fairly large well known cities (i.e. Los Angeles has about 15,000 people being monitored in this program,  Houston approximately 3,500).

Then there is the city of Harlingen, Texas. There are 62,222 people being monitored in Harlingen. Meanwhile, there are only 71,925 people that live in Harlingen, according to the US Census Bureau. The Census also lists the population as 14.7% foreign-born.  So, where are all these people being monitored? I did find an article about a migrant shelter in Harlingen where some men were interviewed, including one with an ankle monitor, and it mentions that he had plans to move to Miami to stay with his brother until his court date, which could be months or years into the future.  So maybe Harlingen’s surveillance reach crosses over into other cities or even states? Or perhaps people stay in towns in the area?

I’m not yet sure what I would do with any of this. The surveillance that these people are dealing with is fascinating to me because it reminds me of the COVID-19 surveillance I’ve been living through in China, so it’s a population of heavily surveilled people that have migrated to a country where I have some hope of receiving a response to FOIA requests and where there are nonprofit organizations in the area attempting to help that I can potentially reach out to. At the moment, this sounds pretty promising in terms of possible access (I’m also operating under the optimistic impression that I might be able to get out of China for a bit next year).

Possible snags: There have been some studies into the effects of surveillance on people before, though, and that a private company holds these people’s information is not great for transparency and will heavily restrict what kinds of projects I can attempt. So not sure what this might translate to project-wise at the moment.

But it feels like a possible place to start in a direction I’ve been pushing toward for longer than I realized.

Time Got Away – Weeks 8-11 / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0