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Episode 4: Surveillance

Transcript

Monamie Bhadra Haines (MBH)

The state says, Do you want housing, or do you want forests? You know, do you want public health, or do you want privacy? It's always put in these kinds of dichotomies. So, surveillance of everything; there's a need for perfect data.

Eleanor Paynter (EP) 

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in Migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it.

In this episode, we're talking about migration and surveillance. This topic might bring to mind border security and walls. It's in these liminal spaces where one nation is divided from another that we often think of the surveillance of migrants: border patrol, cameras monitoring movements, and checkpoints where uniformed officers examine documents. But in my conversations for this episode, we learn about surveillance practices that take us beyond drones and paper trails and that get us thinking across migration contexts, about multiple uses – and users – of tracking technologies. We hear about two very different settings: Dr. Monamie Bhadra Haines speaks with us about migrant workers in Singapore. And then Monamie and I are joined by Dr. Lorenzo Pezzani, who speaks with us about migration in the Mediterranean Sea.

The surveillance issues we discuss aren't necessarily new, but surveillance itself has become an especially salient topic as the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted debates about tracing our movements and contacts. Some of this debate centers privacy and individual rights. To what extent should governments be allowed to track our health data? Our interactions with other people?

MBH 

Since I've been here in Singapore and because it's been during the pandemic, my interests have kind of pivoted a little bit to not just be about energy, but also about surveillance technologies. And so what really got me interested was how rapidly the contact tracing apps were rolled out, how quickly that happened.

EP 

That's Monamie Bhadra Haines, Assistant Professor of Global Science, Technology and Society at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Monamie’s interdisciplinary research covers a range of issues related to democracy, energy, and agency across multiple publics. And in our conversation for this episode, she shares insights from a couple of projects she's developed in Singapore, thinking about questions of surveillance, migrancy, and knowledge production, including through her expertise in citizen science practices. We hear how these Singapore-based projects have been shaped by the pandemic, including in response to the country's Trace Together contact tracing app, and what broader questions they raise for thinking about uses of surveillance in migration contexts.

MBH 

It was really interesting to me how the government, they were using the rhetoric of citizen science. Now citizen science has different registers, one is sort of the top down, let's incorporate people and get people excited about science and get them to do a lot of things like bird counts, you know, or count the stars and stuff like that. There's another register of citizen science that is more in line with producing what's called “undone science.” So science that hasn't been done for people living in say, fence-line communities, next to or bordering petrochemical facilities where they're facing a lot of pollution and health problems – but the science that proves that just hasn't been done, you know, hasn't been conducted by either the state or corporations. So citizen science was very important in the Flint water crisis, to figure out that there was actually pollution and what or if there's contamination of lead in the water pipes. So there is this rhetoric of participation, of coming together of creating something as a community for community purposes that, and that this kind of rhetoric in these kinds of radical spaces was being co-opted in some ways by the government to to justify Trace Together in a sort of nationalistic way, saying, we're all coming together as Singaporean citizens and residents to help the country. The state was really adopting this rhetoric to make sure that the only entity that was trusted was the state and not citizens trusting each other.

EP 

Singapore is a rather unique site for taking up questions of surveillance and migration. The island state has a total population of around 5 million and that includes more than 1 million foreign workers. Within that foreign population, more than 300,000 are low wage workers, many originally from countries like India and Bangladesh, who work in construction and manufacturing industries and who live together in dormitories built by their employers. As COVID-19 spread, Singapore placed these workers in a strict lockdown that Alex Au Vice President of the nonprofit group, transient workers count to describe to the New York Times by saying, quote, basically, they're treated as prisoners to be transported out for work and then transported back. Returning to my conversation with Monamie.

MBH

One of the things that I'm really interested in, have been, parallel to following this kind of citizen science rhetoric, is how the migrant communities have it – what I mean by migrant communities is I'm specifically thinking of the low wage, male, South Asian, Bangladeshi, you know, from Myanmar, migrant workers who are living in these very large purpose-built dormitories that are highly securitized, and how these places have become sites of surveillance, surveillance experiments, like a lot of these apps were initially tested and mandated here, before they were sort of titrated and rolled out to other people in Singapore. So this technology, centralized data, and what Trace Together does is that it traces who you're with. So one of the ways that was trying to say that, to kind of mitigate the privacy concerns, is saying it's not a tracking device, it's not geolocation, it's not tracing where you are, but what it's doing is, you know, pinging off of Bluetooth of other phones to know who you're around, right. And that data goes centrally to the Ministry of Health. And they're the ones, if someone comes on as like comes up as having a transmission, then you get notified, you know. So what is going to be done with this data? was very much – I mean, of course, we said, a lot of things could be done with this data. But they had promised that it wasn't going to be used for any other purposes other than contract tracing. But recently, it's definitely being used in like police cases that sort of come up, too. And so right now, my, the big project that I'm interested in, is to understand how the migration regime that's highly racialized and gendered of, you know, who is allowed to work here, and for what kinds of jobs, and how the surveillance system is sort of reproducing those kinds of classifications in different ways.

EP 

It's really interesting that you initially presented this as a project that the state at least is framing also as a kind of citizen science project, or at least it's drawing on some of that rhetoric, it sounds like. But if it was tested first with migrants, can you say a little bit more about the place of the migrant in a citizen science project?

MBH 

Right.

EP 

How does that – how does that work?

MBH

Yeah, so let me just give a little bit of context maybe about Singapore for because I, I mean, I know when I first moved here, I really knew little about Singapore. And let me preface all this by saying that, in many ways, I have been very grateful to be in Singapore to weather the pandemic here. Because it what's happening on the other side of the world seems just like a nightmare, dystopia. And here, sure, you can call it a little bit of that, too. But I am not scared to go out. There's no anti-masking protest or anything like that. So I just want to say that before I critique the Singapore state, you know.

So Singapore, as a British colony, you know – I guess I'll say that a lot of the discourses around migration that at least I hear in the United States and Europe are about, are in the context of illegality and fear and how to live with the different other like how to live with these others. Right. And in Singapore and in Southeast Asia, the migration issue is different because it's not in terms of illegality. They've been – there's been a long history, from colonial times to now, about migration being you know, of a lot of people coming in as low wage migrants to Singapore who are not seen as citizens. Right. And so Lee Kuan Yew, he was the first prime minister, he was a eugenicist and he established the so-called CMIO model where you have a Chinese majority than others drawn from the Malay Archipelago, and Indians and Other Eurasians. So you have a kind of a racial superstructure hierarchy here, right, of who's a citizen.

About 33% of the workforce here are migrants, and a majority of them, that's about 1.5 million people, and the majority of them are low wage. And so you have people who are drawn from Bangladesh and India and a little bit of China and Myanmar, who work in the construction, marine like shipyard building work, and you have a lot of female domestic workers from the Philippines, and Indonesia and Myanmar, who live inside our houses as domestic workers. And then you have a lot of other people who are in the service industry and food and beverage and things like that. But you do have these migrant workers who are brought in, the construction workers, who are often invisiblized in different ways, and they're put in these places that are, you know, that they can land up to 10,000 people. And they're in rooms that are about 10 to 12 people in a room, you know, it's not – it can be squalid. I mean, they're, they're owned by – these buildings are owned by the employers, not the government. And, you know, a lot of these men take on a lot of debt to come here, so $7,000 to $10,000, to get recruited. And then they only get paid 400 to $600 a month. And so it's hard to pay off that debt, right. And as they are here, they are, you know – thinking about exclusion and inclusion – they are included in Singapore, but in this highly structured way, where, you know, so for, for example, for foreign domestic workers, these women, they have to get pregnancy tests every six months, you know, to they cannot get married to a Singaporean; they have to go back if they get pregnant. Same goes for men. So there, and even in like, geographically, a lot of these buildings are on the periphery of the island, and you see them being ferried around and open-air lorries from place to place, right. So there's this kind of desire not to integrate their bodies into the Singapore state. So it's easy then to have them not be treated as citizens per se, but as, as denizens perhaps, and people who are, you know, who have to participate in these experiments, right. They're the ones on whom Trace Together was first tested; they have to wear the tokens everywhere. At one point, they had to download about three apps, you know that, that monitor their health, that is also tied to their work pass status. And if it's not all green, they can't go. But one of the problems they faced early on is that a lot of these apps only worked with iPhones, and they all had Huawei phones. And so they were going to, like, the police and like the guards to try to get their phones to work and get to the green status so they could go to work. And it's just, you know, some of the interviews we've done, have shown that it's been – been mixed.

EP 

I'm really interested in the work you're doing here. Also, because I think so often, when we think about surveillance and migration, we're thinking especially about a national border space, so a wall or the tech that's now used in place of a physical wall. And this is such an important example of how surveillance really shapes the lives of migrants well beyond their moment of arrival. And it's not just about policing a border, but it also sounds like it's about other ways of creating and maintaining all kinds of borders within a country too. I know you're working on another project about wastewater. Could you talk about what that project involves and how it's linked to some of these surveillance questions?

MBH

Yeah, so this project, the wastewater surveillance is really about. It's a it's a method of sampling wastewater at different points of the sewage system, to try to ascertain if there is any viral RNA of Coronavirus there. And so what it does is from the point of entry into the sewage system, depending upon where it's sampled, you can catch asymptomatic people. So right now to know the incidence of Coronavirus, you have to rely on clinical reports, right, of people who are reporting that they're sick, and then you get a test. But a lot of people are asymptomatic. And so they shed their virus through their waist, their saliva, their stool, whatever. And it's interesting, because you can do like, so far it's aggregate sampling. So it's like, everybody in an apartment block or something like that, right? And, and this could kind of obviate the kind of individual privacy issues. But again, this is was first tested in the dormitories and actually also where I am in the university. That's another like space of surveillance, experimentation, yeah – not with the faculty, as much as I know, but with the student dorms, you know. And so, once you know, once you have a positive, the question is, what is the policy response going to be? Are they going to quarantine everybody? Are they going to do individual testing? And I was at a meeting once and someone's like, Oh, well, now we need a good quality stool, like we can target the constipated neighborhoods and, you know, give them some measure of surveillance, like without it, without contact tracing, it's hard to manage this kind of thing, if you leave it just up to the individual. I think the question is, like, what do these surveillance technologies perform? Like, what do they actually do? And how are they performative? So in Singapore, it's not clear that they actually do like solve anything, you know, because even before contact tracing and this kind of surveillance, even before it was tested on migrant communities, Singapore was doing a pretty good job of getting, you know, of getting people tested of getting people socially distanced. We had immediate like, we learned a lot from SARS. And for that reason, I think that we were doing fine without the technology. But this is an opportunity for Singapore to ramp up its smart nation initiative and make everything digital, right. And so right now we have temperature scanners everywhere, everywhere we go, even if it's in the same mall at different stores in a mall, we have to check in and scan our temperature everywhere. Temperature is not a good proxy for if you're sick. But what it does is discipline us, everybody, to you know, just agree to being – to being surveilled like this. It's normalized. So even though it started in the dorms, it spread to us, like the so-called community. And so I think that is really important to think about, and who is being surveilled and over-surveilled and to what purposes.

EP

Monamie also told us that many migrants in Singapore are participating in “sousveillance,” a sort of reverse surveillance in which people monitor authorities or those around them, in this case, filming, photographing and documenting with messaging apps. Surveillance gives people the tools to upset power imbalances. In the US context, we've seen how critical surveillance can be, for example, in documenting police violence, or supporting protesters in Singapore Monamie has seen it applied to documents squalid or overcrowded conditions in the dormitories, among other examples.

And so we can think about how technologies of tracking, observation, documentation can also be used as advocacy tools in support of rights. To employ these methods is, in this way, also to challenge dominant or state-controlled narratives. Who is telling the story?

One group practicing this counternarrative work is Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths in London. Forensic Architecture uses an impressive range of methods to document and investigate human rights violations by states police forces, militaries and corporations. The group's Forensic Oceanography team uses technology to challenge border violence in the Mediterranean. One especially jarring example they've studied is the so-called left-to-die boat, an unseaworthy fishing vessel that carried 72 passengers from the left enclosed out into the Mediterranean Sea in 2011. Despite that international law stipulates that boats in distress must be rescued. This boat, when it ran out of fuel, was left to drift back towards Libya for 15 days, during which time 63 of its passengers died.

Lorenzo Pezzani (LP)

What was interesting is then after, you know, the like the survivors reached the coast of Libya, they managed through, by giving interviews with a number of journalists, to denounce how there were, you know, a number of let's say, military assets had really gone very close to them to observe them, and then left without providing any assistance.

EP 

Joining us here is Lorenzo Pezzani, a lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths. Together with Charles Heller, he leads the Forensic Oceanography team. They collaborate with a range of groups, including grassroots organizations, civil society groups, and legal teams to address violence in the Mediterranean Sea, including the criminalization of rescue operations and the 1000s of migrant deaths that have occurred at sea over the last decade. Their projects appear in art galleries, academic spaces, and also in legal cases, where their work with surveillance technologies and testimonies can challenge state narratives that deny wrongdoing, for example, in cases concerning the failure to rescue migrants, as they prove that authorities, in fact knew about migrants in distress and that ships were in the vicinity and could have, in fact, performed rescue. This is, for example, what their investigation of the left-to-die boat shows.

LP

There were a number of like, ships from Canada to the US to, you know, European assets that were present and closely monitoring what was happening, right. So in dialogue with the number of human rights organizations and legal scholars, we launched, somehow, an inquiry into what happened, trying to understand how it was possible that these people had been, you know, noticed by like, by these military assets, but not assisted, right. Of course, you know, the non-assisting people in distress at sea is a crime also under international law, right. So what we did, was starting from the testimony of some of the survivors, trying to use a number of other, you know, technologies and, and, and forms of witnessing, in a sense that present in the area, including surveillance technologies themselves, you know, to try to reconstruct what had happened to these people, right, and try to corroborate their testimonies.

And this is what we produced as our investigation on the left-to-die boat, which documented these multiple encounters with, first a helicopter and then a military ship that came very close to the people in distress, but did not provide any assistance. And so this was the base on which the legal groups, the legal scholars we work with, you know, submitted a number of legal actions in various countries across the world, all the countries that were participating in the NATO military operations. But also it was the basis for a kind of renewed somehow call for increased search and rescue activities in the central Mediterranean and more generally, a way I guess, to denounce the ways in which European policies of migration create the structural conditions in which people are then forced to kind of you know, take unseaworthy boats, and then, you know, end up not being rescued by by, you know, those very states that put them first in those conditions. Right. So I guess that's an example of how we somehow, you know, try to use surveillance technologies against the grain, right, a term that we use was, you know, a concept that we use was that of a “disobedient gaze,” right. So we tried to understand our own use of surveillance technologies in a way that would not reproduce the technological eye of policing, right, that was not trying to reveal what the border regime was trying to reveal, i.e. you know, the kind of, the patterns of crossing of legalized migrants but rather to show what it tried to keep hidden.

EP 

And also especially struck, I mean, it's a, it's such a, it's a really important example, both for its uses of technology, and also the legal implications. And I'm also really struck by your use of witnessing the concept of witnessing and I wonder if this is something that resonates with me with your work in any way, the idea of, well, first of all, we can think about the how the state is or is not bearing witness through its uses of technology in these cases, and then also how through testimony from people who were involved, so from border crossers, and then maybe through technologies that produce or are vehicles of testimony and of witnessing, how these different accounts come together. I'm thinking about what Monamie has talked about in her work on the kinds of knowledge production also that happen in these, in these instances. Monamie, does this resonate with you?

MBH

Yeah, I mean, I was just really struck by how that could happen in that space, because I cannot imagine that kind of technologically mediated, counternarrative narrative production happening so much in Singapore, it's not that it's not happening, you know, I think there's a sort of a caricature of Singapore as being a complete authoritarian state. It is a kind of – it has a credibility economy, it has like in terms of who people consider to be legitimate forms of governance, right. And, but at the same time, I'm thinking about how we have very strict laws here, there's the Protection against Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, POFMA. And over during the circuit breaker last year, there have been numerous examples of people trying to assert these kinds of counternarratives about what, for example, was going on in the dorms, how many cases, who were, you know – and periodically in the national newspaper there would be corrections: No, that is not correct, you know, and they would give a statement about what the real truth was, you know. So, in thinking about that kind of witnessing, it's not that there aren't witnesses; there are. But what kind of visibility those witnesses have to speak to the state, right. And in many senses, this was constructed, the dormitory crisis, because, you know, as I was saying, it's all legal migration, and the borders are within the state rather than, you know, people trying to get into Singapore. But even at those kinds of internal borders, it's because of the high incidence of these POFMA kinds of cases.

It’s very difficult for anybody to actually produce a counternarrative, but it doesn't mean that it's not going on. So where it's going on is through WhatsApp, right. It's through WhatsApp, where people are sharing memes and, you know, gossiping, that's how counternarratives are being produced. It's being produced by people who are biohacking themselves. Or there was an article about thickheaded Singaporeans and how they are smashing their Trace Together tokens that they have to wear, that show where they're, where they're at, you know, and who they're with. So they're putting them in Faraday cages to prevent it from sending out signals. So that's how it's being produced. And, you know, there's, there's some artist activity going on, a lot of the art spaces are doing this kind of thing. But in terms of using technology, beyond social media, which, of course, is a surveillance technology, too, you can't really get those kinds of counternarratives in that same way here.

EP 

I'm also someone who's really interested in narrative here, so I'm struck in both your examples by these different, the different genres of counternarratives that are emerging. And I was thinking about this, Lorenzo, as I was watching the Iuventa video again recently, from the your film on that case. And thinking about the portrayal of migrants in that video and how you're also very, maybe this has also to do with what you said about not wanting to reproduce a police gaze. In thinking about these, this kind of work, I was struck by how, for a lot of I think humanitarian narratives, the appeal would have been to center individual migrant stories, talk about where people are coming from. And in your work a lot of what you're doing, in my reading anyway, is a really clear scientific documentation of what has happened based on things like calculating geographically, thinking about wind speed, and so we see the migrants because they're there in the boats, but it's not about some kind of empathic appeal to their presence at all.

LP 

You know, normally, forensics is understood as somehow, you know, kind of – this so-called forensic turn you is also understood as a move away from the era of the witness, right? So, you know, and move away from the fallibility of human testimony that is kind of complicated by trauma and and, you know, leads to lapses and misremembering, and so on and so forth, to the kind of absolute certitude of, let's say, scientific and technological inflected forms of witnessing, right. But this is a kind of definition that I think our project in many ways tries to resist and contest, right. Obviously, you know, I'm sure I don't need to, you know, say this in this context, but yeah, to anyone you know, who has some familiarity with with, you know, the kind of older literature and discussions around the witnessing, etc., you know, that idea of the infallibility of the kind of objective truth of, you know, science and technology, it's, you know, just another name for, you know, kind of power that tries to impose, you know, the tyranny of its own truth, right, and kind of erase, you know, other forms of witnessing from from the field. Right.

So, in a sense, we are very aware of, of the narrative and the kind of risk that that brings with it, right. So in our, you know, in our work, I guess, we try to work with those issues and those contradictions in a number of ways, first of all, you know, by, let's say, it's not that we try to move away from from human witnessing, but all of our investigations, in a sense, start from an encounter also with people, with survivors, with people who have undergone a specific form of violence. And and, you know, a lot of these investigations are really kind of emerging out of a demand of accountability that first comes from them, in a sense, right. And and so we are trying to use some of these tools in a way that that would allow us to get to reinforce and corroborate their testimony, rather than substituted with something else. Right? And if we do it, like with through those kinds of more technological means is that because, yeah, in a sense, it's also a way of interrogating, you know, who and what can constitute a witness, right. And so, of course, let's say in our investigation, we also rely on other forms on kind of more-than-human forms of witnessing you were mentioning, you know, ocean currents and winds, etc., which are a way for us to transform the seat self, in a sense into a sort of, of weakness, right, so we are trying to relocate, somehow, you know, subjective forms of witnessing within a broader, more somehow hybrid assemblage of different forms of data and information. But at the same time, I guess we try to insert that in a very specific, let's say, you know, to embed that in a very specific point of view and to, you know, to situate that, you know, to use a kind of more feminist term, like in a very specific perspective, right, and, you know, kind of foreground and a certain account of the events that emerges from that situated perspective.

EP 

I want to shift gears just a little bit, just as a sort of last set of questions. Lorenzo, you mentioned already the question of water and wind, we've kind of gone there. And I'd be curious to hear again, from both of you. So one of the things we're interested in, in this podcast, and in the Migrations initiative here more broadly, are the connections between human migration and the natural and built environment. So the interconnectedness of various movements, migration and, you know, national and international border crossing being one of them. And Lorenzo, you've spoken a little bit to the question of – I love the idea of the sea as witness. It's so compelling. I wanted to ask Monamie first, if you might talk a little bit about the, perhaps the relationship with the built environment in Singapore is the place to start for thinking about connections between surveillance and migrations again.

MBH 

Yeah, so maybe one anecdote that I will say is that a historian colleague of mine once told me that at one point, every single tree in Singapore was known. So, you know, this is a 7000-something square kilometer place, and every single tree was known at that point. So surveillance of the natural world is also simultaneously surveillance of humans to in some sense, because disciplining the natural world is also creating a certain kind of a citizen in Singapore. And, you know, when we think of border crossings, and the ways the natural world in Singapore is managed, they have a lot of macaques here. They're frequently – or not, I wouldn't say frequently – but they're counted and culled, right? Second growth forests, you know, things grow really fast here. Currently, we're, there's a little bit of a protest against one of the oldest forests in Singapore being cut down for housing. And so the state says, Do you want housing, or do you want forests? You know, do you want public health? Or do you want privacy? It's always put in these kinds of dichotomies. So surveillance of everything, there's a there's a need for perfect data at all times in Singapore. You want to have the perfect graph that tells you everything about everything, instantaneously, right. And let me just give one other example: in, in our houses, in the housing development board, they have, like, you know, houses that people can have in these sort of like, high rises, right, that the majority of Singaporeans live in, and where the domestic worker stays is a basically like a tiny closet, right? It's an afterthought. So in some places, it's a bomb shelter that's been converted into, like during the Japanese occupation. So how people live here is really also simultaneously how they're how they're surveilling each other, and being surveilled. And I think that is very much tied in and of the same piece of how the natural world in Singapore is also monitored.

EP 

That's really fascinating. Lorenzo, what does this bring up for you?

LP

Let's say the ways in which I've been thinking about this question, mostly, especially, you know, a bit more recently, in the last year or so has been through a project that I call Hostile Environments. And hostile environments, you know, is the name of the set of, you know, legislation that has been passed here in the UK since 2012. It's, it's the actual name that Theresa May, who at the time was interior minister, Home Secretary, tried. And she said, you know, with this legislation, we want to deny migrants access to you know, work, housing services, education, right, really rendering the whole environment in which they are living in a hostile space, right. And so this really resonated with me, as somebody who, over the last few years, as I was saying, you know, it's been investigating how the space of the Mediterranean, so a kind of natural environment in that case, has also been rendered into a space of hostility to migrants, right. And, you know, there I think our work has tried to really demonstrate how, you know, shipwrecks that happen, you know, in that space are not kind of natural tragedies, right. But there really, are the outcomes, and the direct consequence of, you know, the denial of visa the, you know, the possibility for migrants to use safe and legal means of transportation, right. So, in a sense, I was intrigued to think, across these two spaces, right, let's say the space of the Mediterranean, which in some way, you know, it's kind of resonates with the ways in which other natural environments that have also turned into spaces of hostility for migrants. And on the other end, the ways in which the very kind of urban built environment in which we inhabit, you know, or most of us, at least inhabit, live, has also been transformed into the spaces of hostility, right, this kind of, you know, idea of, of a generalized atmosphere of hostility that has led to shrinking forms of social protections, right for all of those classified as outsiders, right. So in this project, and somehow trying to think about these two forms of border control, as, you know, kind of deeply interconnected, right. And, and as part of the same kind of logic, right.

EP 

I'm thinking also a lot about the word suspicion, which we haven't brought up yet in the conversation, but which is also a way that – cultures of suspicion are often cultivated in response to precarious migration, irregular migration, whatever we want to call it, as a way of framing migrants in their movements. And I'm thinking about how, and in many ways – and the question of hostility brings this up, too – about the role of suspicion in some of these technologies, how is surveillance technology as applied by the state can kind of legitimize a culture of suspicion, and then also the different kinds of activism that you've each talked about and also the different kinds of, of the work of producing these counter counternarratives and counter-expertise as a kind of as also is serving to counter that culture of suspicion. So – is that a sort of fair point?

MBH 

Yes, that's a fair point. I mean, I'm just thinking of how citizen activism has taken shape in Singapore, and how it is really has not undermined the state's authority in any way. And in producing the kind of counter-expertise, it's foreclosed, some kinds of questions, but not others, with respect to migrant workers. You know, there's a lot of talk about our foreign brothers, our foreign friends, this language is used a lot, a lot by NGOs. And there's a lot of effort to try to humanize them, show them as people who are worthy of trust, worthy of compassion, worthy of humanity. But at the same time, it does so based on some sorts of cultural stereotypes to like, oh, Bangladeshi workers, you know, they're not all smelly, they're, you know, they're fine. They're also far from home. Because this is a brand of multiculturalism here. And that has not been the sort of, we're all in a separate but equal, but not so equal in reality, kind of situation is still, it's hard to get away from that, even by those who are trying to counter it some, in some ways.

LP 

That's really interesting. And I think it's also nice to, you know, maybe end on a slightly more kind of self-critical point right now, just as a kind of celebration of like, this kind of practices, but also, kind of yeah, pointing to some of the very questions and problems that traverse them, right, and that, you know, are part and parcel of this kind of practices. I mean, maybe it's obviously something slightly differently, but if I think about some of our own work, I think, you know, one of the questions that we have been asking ourselves, again, I've been asking at least myself, let's say, quite a lot in relation to these practices, is also, you know, I was speaking about this idea of, like, a collective witnessing or a collective testimony, right? And, and obviously, when you bring together collective, there is always the risk, on the one hand to reproduce some of the very, you know, power relations that existed, you know, before that collective was brought into being, or even accentuate or or, you know, exacerbate some of them, right. And I think, you know, when, when I was thinking earlier, when I was speaking earlier about the question of, let's say, how our work tries to, you know, build upon and, and, and kind of, you know, corroborate migrants, testimonies, right, there is obviously also something to say about the ways in which, you know, that practice tends to erase somehow a kind of unequal, you know, kind of power relation that exists between those who provide the witnessing, and those who assemble the witnessing, right. And, and, you know, it's, I think in a lot of also think about, let's say open source, investigative journalism, etc., there is always a bit of a risk, let's say to to celebrate those who, you know, bring those to get those kinds of forms of witnessing together and for whom, let's say the risks are quite low, but the rewards usually are quite high – versus those who actually produce that that testimony, right, or, or that kind of embody that testimony for whom, you know, the stakes are usually very high and the risks are very high, you know, often, you know, at the cost of their lives, right. But for whom, you know, the rewards usually are very low, right, and they are not, let's say, they, they tend to remain in the kind of background of those narratives and those histories.

EP

Thanks to Monamie and Lorenzo for speaking with us and sharing their perspective on surveillance and migration. Our listeners should be sure to check out Monamie’s work on these issues in Singapore, as well as work related to her current book project, Democratic Reactors: Nuclear Power, Activism and Experiments with Credibility in India. And you can find more references were in the book Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis, where he's co-authored a chapter with Charles Heller. Take a look at his Hostile Environments project as well. You can find links to this work and more on our website, migrations.cornell.edu/podcasts.

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a multidisciplinary multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us @GlobalCornell and #CornellMigrations. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, migrations postdoctoral associate with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Cayuga Nation, and we recognize Cayuga Nation’s sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett. Migrations: A World on the Move is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.