Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Sociocultural Dimensions of New Biometric Security Infrastructures

今天，技术在我们的社会和政治生活中的作用越来越大，会产生什么影响？某些技术对象的日益普遍，特别是以扩散界面的形式，立即就能观察到。然而，身份识别和安全技术，如生物识别技术，甚至是电子数据库等普通形式，对我们来说都更加不透明。这个项目培训研究生如何进行严谨的、有经验的科学实地考察，将使用以科学实地考察为基础的方法来研究当今生活中最显著的特征之一：大规模的、联网的数据库。鉴于与美国及其全球事务有关的日益严重的安全关切，至关重要的是要调查数据库身份识别技术如何与安全和治理做法相结合。这个项目将发展对安全基础设施的经验理解；它询问它们如何渗透到社会领域，如亲属关系、移民、商业和居住实践，塑造似乎远远超出安全范围的日常生活的方方面面。它将增进对安全做法对公共政策、社会和地缘政治关系的社会和政治影响的理解。因此，它将促进方案和政策的发展，以创造安全而公平的社会环境。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，研究结果还将传播给探索和管理安全实践的原因、后果和复杂性的组织和个人。Zehra Hashmi将在密歇根大学的Matthew Hull博士的指导下，探索新的安全基础设施、亲属关系和社会组织之间的关系。这项研究的重点是国家生物识别的先驱之一：巴基斯坦国家数据库和注册机构(NADRA)，以及它塑造日常社会生活领域的方式和方法。Nadra的意义在于它的无处不在：它被用来银行、支付账单、学校招生、购买手机芯片、财产交易和投票。参与NADRA行动的关键参与者是整合和验证数据的算法，特别是创建亲属单位的家庭关系。这项研究将通过研究NADRA对伊斯兰堡普什图族移民的影响来分析NADRA如何重建亲属关系，对他们来说，身份证是一个核心关注点。通过在普什图社区和NADRA机构站点的多地点人种学田野调查，本研究询问NADRA的身份识别过程如何以更普遍的方式塑造安全概念。这项研究将收集关于NADRA如何告知城市空间的主张和体验的数据，特别是针对被边缘化的种族的数据。此外，它将调查NADRA本身是如何由公民塑造的，以及这揭示了治理和安全做法的哪些方面。因此，这项研究将阐明数据库、安全做法和少数民族地位之间的联系，因为它们具体化为一个由国家组织的单一信息基础设施。这对于生物识别、信息和监控技术在全球其他地方，特别是美国的治理中发挥越来越大的作用，具有广泛的比较意义和普遍的见解。

What is the impact of the expanding role of technology in our social and political lives today? The increasing ubiquity of certain technological objects, specifically in the form of proliferating interfaces, is immediately observable. However, identification and security technologies such as biometrics and even mundane forms like electronic databases are more opaque to us. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, will use scientific fieldwork-based methods to examine one of the most salient features of modern life today: large-scale, networked databases. Given heightening security concerns, in relation to the United States and its global affairs, it is crucial to investigate how databased identification technologies intersect with security and governance practices. This project will develop an empirical understanding of security infrastructures; it asks how they percolate into social domains such as kinship, migration, commerce, and dwelling practices, shaping aspects of ordinary life seemingly far outside the purview of security. It will enhance understandings of the social and political implications of security practices as they bear upon public policy, social and geopolitical relations. Thus, it will facilitate the development of programs and policies in order to produce secure yet equitable social environments. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, findings will be disseminated to organizations and individuals that explore and manage the causes, consequences, and complexities of security practices.Zehra Hashmi, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Hull of the University of Michigan, will explore the relationship between new security infrastructures, kinship, and social organization. This research focuses on one of the pioneers in national biometric identification: Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), and manner and means in which it shapes domains of everyday social life. NADRA's significance lies in its ubiquity: the card is used for banking, paying bills, school admissions, acquiring a cell phone chip, property transactions and voting. Key actors involved in NADRA operations are algorithms that integrate and verify data, particularly familial relations creating kin units. This research will analyze how NADRA reconstitutes kin ties by studying its effects on Pashtun migrants in Islamabad, for whom the identity card is a central preoccupation. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Pashtun neighborhoods and NADRA's institutional sites, this research asks how NADRA's identification processes shape conceptions of security in a more generalizable manner. This study will collect data on how NADRA informs claims and experiences of urban space, especially for the ethnically marginalized. Further, it will investigate how NADRA itself is shaped by citizens, and what this reveals about governance and security practices. Thus, this study will illuminate connections between databases, security practices, and the status of ethnic minorities as they crystalize into a single, state-organized information infrastructure. This holds broad comparative implications and generalizable insights for the growing role of biometric, information and surveillance technologies for governance elsewhere on the globe, particularly the United States.