Some of the core assumptions in the government’s discourses surrounding border protection can be found when analyzing the way that technology is usually portrayed as the most neutral, effective and efficient way of securing the border. Behind these discourses, there are presuppositions about the application of scientific knowledge in technology, about the political (or rather, “apolitical”) role that technologies play in society, about the values involved in the development and deployment of technological artifacts, as well as ideas about directionality in technology and a purported progress that accompanies this trajectory. Archive materials, such as this congressional hearing where the role of technology in securing the border is discussed, constitute sites where all of the previous assumptions materialize and have a direct influence on border management policies. Innovating STS when analyzing this type of discourses implies dissecting and sometimes dismantling some of these preconceived notions while engaging with very different and heterogeneous sources (academic literature, government and official documents; news, interviews, op-eds and mass media; as well as diplomatic archives).
House Hearing and 109th Congress, "Assumptions about Technologies at the Border", contributed by Ariel Sánchez-Zúñiga, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 26 June 2019, accessed 2 October 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/assumptions-about-technologies-border
Critical Commentary
Some of the core assumptions in the government’s discourses surrounding border protection can be found when analyzing the way that technology is usually portrayed as the most neutral, effective and efficient way of securing the border. Behind these discourses, there are presuppositions about the application of scientific knowledge in technology, about the political (or rather, “apolitical”) role that technologies play in society, about the values involved in the development and deployment of technological artifacts, as well as ideas about directionality in technology and a purported progress that accompanies this trajectory. Archive materials, such as this congressional hearing where the role of technology in securing the border is discussed, constitute sites where all of the previous assumptions materialize and have a direct influence on border management policies. Innovating STS when analyzing this type of discourses implies dissecting and sometimes dismantling some of these preconceived notions while engaging with very different and heterogeneous sources (academic literature, government and official documents; news, interviews, op-eds and mass media; as well as diplomatic archives).