Doing digital identity research implies the responsibility of preserving epistemic justice. This means looking right in the eyes of the data-induced harm that permeates our phenomena of interest, connected to the conversion of individuals into machine-readable data. For me, it also involves being a constant learner, and one that writes ID stories straight from the voices of the digitally identified.
I am currently developing an epistemic justice protocol for the stories narrated in my forthcoming book. (If you haven’t seen me on these pages for a couple of months, well… that is what I have been up to, primarily. That and many other things in and beyond the digital ID galaxy, including freezing my eggs, for instance.)
Designing this protocol is easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a researcher. Combating epistemic violence, an act that Galvan-Alvarez (2010) defines as an act of violence exerted both on knowledge and through it, is an endeavour that involves deploying all our tools to voice narratives silenced by very precise lines of discourse. To put it with Spivak (1988), combating epistemic violence means deconstructing historiography, re-narrating history from the point of view of marginalised voices that a mainstream narrative silences. In this interstice of time in between two large digital ID conferences, ID for Africa that ended on 25 May and the Identity Week Europe starting 13 June, Spivak’s (1988) words resound in my mind every single day.
My stance is that narrating stories from a recipient’s perspective is the heart of epistemic justice in digital ID research. And this means the gist of ALL stories. Stories of happiness with digital ID, of recipients of welfare schemes that with digital identification have found simpler access to the programmes they needed. Voices of users that welcomed the “anti-corruption” power of biometrics. And at the same time, voices of users that became barred from accessing food and cash programmes because of glitches with digital authentication, or more radically because of issues at the stage of registration of details. This is why spending days, months sitting at the interface between the person and the technology, interface that in my work has meant being in ration shops, acquires primary importance. Far away as it may be from the echelons of power, the digital ID-mediated ration shop is the space where the person is protagonist, and where justice for their voice can be restored.
Barbed wire fence, Bethlehem (Palestine), August 2012
But there is more to that. The mandate of doing epistemic justice involves the mandate of being a learner.
Not an occasional one. A learner every day. One that encounters concepts, processes them, and builds an inventory of the stories that their being-in-the-world involves. Let me give you a few examples of what this has meant for me, in this week alone.
Yesterday colleagues Emrys Schoemaker, Aaron Martin and Keren Weitzberg have published a piece titled “Digital Identity and Inclusion: Tracing Technological Transitions”, which discusses the intersection of digital ID with the perpetration of surveillance, exclusion and privacy breaches. The article illuminates how history has evolved from “Big ID” – an expression coined by Access Now to discuss centralised, state-level ID systems – to decentralised architectures that promise “empowerment” on the very gnoseological basis of “decentralisation” (see Cheesman’s brilliant PhD thesis on this topic). Keeping a rights’ perspective (the article ends with the highlight of the importance of “recentring rights”), the article illuminates a history whose ongoing phase features superapps, whose data assemblages allow the construction of ready-made, commercially-usable profiles of digitally identified people.. Bidisha Chaudhuri’s illuminating piece on Programming Welfare, breaking ground on algorithmic management in social protection, comes to mind.
Yesterday as well, I have had to the opportunity to learn from Katherine Wyers on the anti-LGBTQ+ law recently passed in Uganda, which introduces the death penalty or life imprisonment for “certain same-sex acts”, along with more measures criminalising people who are identified as LGBTQ+. Such measures, argues Wyers in her latest blog post, have serious implications for organisations involved in collecting, storing and sharing identity data. Wyers’ post is perhaps the strongest reminder of the importance of preserving epistemic justice that I had in many weeks. Digital ID, the object of our research, is being used to search, find, profile users, and when the politics of the artefact is brought to the extreme, it can be used to enforce laws that de-humanise people instead of granting rights. The work of Keren Weitzberg on the loss of rights caused by double registration in Kenya, the work of Eve Hayes de Kalaf on the making of citizens into foreigners in the Dominican Republic, the work of Lucrezia Canzutti on ethnic Vietnamese’s access to citizenship in Cambodia, come to mind.
And being a learner is inseparable from being a fieldworker, I believe.
The picture accompanying this post was taken in Aida refugee camp, in the West Bank of Palestine, in 2012. The barbed wire you see separates a land – Palestine, living under a military and settler occupation that causes violence and death since 1948 – from the outside, an outside where Palestinian refugees have no rights to be. My time in Palestine taught me to ask questions. Why, how, through which technologies is such efferate violence taking place. Only knowing how will we ever know how to fight it.
Doing epistemic justice means being rigorous, to the finest detail. And we have a responsibility to it.
Unfair ID 