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

在数字时代，政府、政治团体和企业越来越多地将数字技术整合到他们的基础设施中(尤班克斯2017年；蒂里亚德2019年)。因此，网络和数字技术往往处于当代社会正义挑战和机遇的前沿。学者和活动人士对这些变化的回应是，提请人们注意数字技术和连接它们的基础设施复制结构性不平等的方式，但也可以成为人们组织政治和实现变革的重要工具(Benjamin 2019；Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015；Noble 2018；Zuboff 2019)。考虑到这一点，这个项目对科技行业在美国一个越来越有争议的社会、经济和政治舞台上的角色进行了质询：生殖政治。在我现有研究的基础上，通过纳入更多的数据，我将在奖学金期间出版一本专著，分析在信息时代关于生殖的社会、政治和经济斗争是如何被重组的。社会和生物繁殖日益成为政治分歧和斗争的中心(布里格斯，2017年；富兰克林和金斯伯格，2019年)。此外，在欧美复活的怀旧本土主义话语背景下，福利、堕胎准入、住房和边境控制等政治问题近年来(再次)成为突出的政治断层。在我的博士学位中，我通过研究三个关键领域，认为营利性技术部门在这一政治领域发挥着越来越重要的作用：(1)反堕胎团体的新兴数字基础设施，(2)电子监控和数据库技术在家庭分离和移民执法中的作用，以及(3)科技投机的城市士绅化和住房不安全的扩大。佛罗里达州因其作为美国南部边境州的社会和政治位置而具有重要意义，它是通过广泛的田野调查进行这些基础设施研究的地点和出发点。专著《记录生殖政治：科技资本主义前沿的新兴斗争》通过开发案例研究2和3，建立在这项工作的基础上。通过该奖学金，我将包括一个由15个访谈组成的新数据集，这些数据将从法律专家、商业利益相关者和政策决策者的角度充实现有的基础设施研究。将这些见解纳入专著是至关重要的，因为它们揭示了政治和经济目标正在塑造有关技术基础设施的方式，将实地工作与更广泛的国家和跨国背景联系起来。拟议研究项目的原创性和影响力还在于其方法方法。在我的博士项目中，我开发了一种独特的方法，结合了特定地点的实地考察、政策分析、媒体分析和采访，以绘制和理清技术基础设施的内部运作。这项开创性工作将为该项目另外两项注重影响的产出的设计和实施提供信息：专题讨论会/讲习班和在线资源。通过额外的培训，我将发展我在数据挖掘研究方法方面的专业知识，以便举办一个虚拟研讨会/研讨会，将来自美国和英国的倡导者、学者和公民社会团体聚集在一起。研讨会将探讨和绘制营利性技术公司参与该项目探索的一个领域：边境管制和移民执法的情况。第三个项目的成果是一个在线资源和工具包，将是我和其他人挖掘的宿主数据，这些数据描绘了私营部门参与者为美国和英国的移民和边境执法开发技术的图景。

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.