John Urry Article Prize 2020 for Silvan Pollozek
The Journal Mobilities awards Silvan Pollozek with the John Urry Article Prize 2020 for his article “Turbulences of speeding up data circulation. Frontex and its crooked temporalities of ‘real-time’border control”
Silvan Pollozek has been awarded with the John Urry Article Prize 2020. The John Urry Memorial Prize is awarded annually by the editors of the journal ‘Mobilities’in honour of the (late) founding editor of the journal, and famous sociologist of mobility, John Urry. Silvan Pollozek works at the chair for sociology of technology at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). In his research, he focuses on data infrastructures of European migration and border control.
Based on an ethnography of the Frontex information system Joint Operation Reporting Application (JORA), the article Turbulences of speeding up data circulation. Frontex and its crooked temporalities of ‘real-time’ border control focuses on the temporalities of data mobility. By focusing on practices and processes of infrastructuring, it works out how data is brought to circulation — but only in form of a ‘crooked’ process. Instead of a seamless flow of data that produces situational pictures of Europe’s border zones quasi ‘real-time’, the implementation of JORA faces data frictions, issues of data quality, synchronization problems of multiple orderings, and the clash of border control practices on the ground. With this, the paper shows how such turbulences not only bring quite a different temporal regime into being but also reshape interorganizational forms of collaboration and border work in the field of European migration and border control.
As the Mobilities Editors announced:
“The Editors think this is an excellent article in drawing on STS methodologies to analyze data flows, temporalities and infrastructuring. [… it] is a critique of Frontex, and makes an important policy intervention. It contributes interesting views on how ‘intersecting orderings of mobility cause struggles between different parties, their agendas, and practices and produce clashes of temporalities on the ground’, which echoes John Urry’s important contributions to thinking about temporalities, as well as his interest in informational mobilities. Pollozek extends the mobilities framework in an innovative way into an analysis of the mobility of data in the context of the structures of Frontex and pressing contemporary issues. Thus it builds an important bridge between critical mobility studies and ‘the geographies of data circulation’ and is another excellent example of the kind of work we support.”
The award will be published in the August issue of Mobilities.
