Travis Van Isacker, Bridget Anderson and Sanja Milivojevic

The Channel, especially its narrowest point at the Dover Straits, is a nexus of intense and overlapping (im)mobilities. People, goods, and data transit it constantly, but with highly uneven speeds and facility. Sociodigital technologies – what we broadly conceive to be digital technologies which shape, while being shaped by, society/social relations – are at the centre of how these mobilities are executed and have an ambivalent role, at times enabling while simultaneously restricting and controlling them. These technologies are developed, deployed, and adopted based on how it is assumed they allow various actors (including both people moving and those whose job it is to regulate movement) to realise their future visions. Not only instrumental to achieving pre-existing futures, whether imagined or already in the making, these technologies are always already embedded with particular futures which they work to promote even before being implemented. However, assumptions and affordances of sociodigital technology are rarely, if ever, congruent. This is especially true in the realm of mobility and its governance which by definition is constantly in flux and remains particularly susceptible to disruption through shifting socio-legal regulatory regimes, signal interference, and natural forces. 

Read in full: censof_Moving domain briefing paper_july23 (PDF, 3,049kB).