Recoding Reproductive Politics: Emerging Struggles at the Frontier of Tech-Capitalism

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In the digital age, governments, political groups and corporations are increasingly integrating digital technologies into their infrastructures (Eubanks 2017; Tillyard 2019). As a result, networked and digital technologies are often at the forefront of contemporary social justice challenges and opportunities. Scholars and activists have responded to these changes by drawing attention to the ways that digital technologies, and the infrastructures that link them, reproduce structural inequality, but can also be vital tools for people to organise politically and effectuate change (Benjamin 2019; Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Noble 2018; Zuboff 2019). With this in mind, this project interrogates the role of the tech-industry in an increasingly contentious social, economic and political arena in the United States: reproductive politics. Building on my existing research, and through the inclusion of additional data, I will produce a monograph during the fellowship that analyses the ways that social, political and economic struggles over reproduction are being reconstituted in the information age. Social and biological reproduction are increasingly at the centre of political division and struggle (Briggs 2017; Franklin and Ginsburg 2019). Moreover, in the context of resurgent nostalgic nativist discourses in Europe and the United States, the politics of welfare, abortion access, housing and border control have (re)emerged in recent years as prominent political fault lines. In my PhD, I argued that the for-profit technology sector is an increasingly important player in this politics by examining three key areas: (1) the emerging digital infrastructures of anti-abortion groups, (2) the role of electronic monitoring and data-base technologies in family separation and immigration enforcement, and (3) the expansion of tech-speculative urban gentrification and housing insecurity. Florida, significant for its social and political location as a border state in the American south, serves as a site and point of departure for these infrastructural studies, researched through extensive fieldwork. The monograph, Recoding Reproductive Politics: Emerging Struggles at the Frontier of Tech-Capitalism, builds on this work by developing case studies 2 and 3. Through the fellowship, I will include a new data-set of 15 interviews, that will augment the existing infrastructural studies with the perspectives of legal experts, business stakeholders and policy decision-makers. These insights are vital to include in monograph, as they shed important light on the ways that political and economic objectives are shaping the technological infrastructures in question, connecting the fieldwork to the broader national and transnational contexts. The proposed research project's originality and impact also lies in its methodological approach. For my doctoral project I developed a unique methodology that combines site-specific fieldwork, policy analysis, media analysis and interviews to map and untangle the inner workings of tech-infrastructures. This pioneering work will inform the design and implementation of the other two impact orientated outputs for this project: a symposium/workshop and an online resource. Through additional training, I will develop my expertise in data-mining research methods in order to deliver a virtual symposium/workshop that will bring together advocates, academics and civil society groups from the US and the UK. The workshop will explore and map the involvement of for-profit technology companies in one of the areas explored by the project: border control and immigration enforcement. The third project output, an online resource and tool-kit will be host data mined by myself and others that maps the landscape of private sector actors developing technology for immigration and border enforcement in the US and the UK.