Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Jennifer Raso, an assistant professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law whose research investigates the relationship between discretion, data-driven technologies, and administrative law. Raso is particularly intrigued by how humans and non-humans collaborate and diverge as they produce institutional decisions, and the consequences for procedural fairness and substantive justice.
In this session, Raso explores how technologies that administer border and immigration policies construct another equally important, but less explored, subject: state agency. Drawing on a recent example from Canada, Raso demonstrates how digitalization simultaneously concentrates state power while diffusing agency, reflecting on what this means for legal accountability mechanisms and decision-making.
Talk title:
“Concentrated power, diffused agency: The effects of digitalized border administration”
Abstract:
Much technological governance literature focuses on how digital technologies differently constitute individuals as members of a broader public. This work centres on individual-scale treatment. It also suggests how this treatment constructs macro-scale publics and political communities.
The technologies that administer state border and immigration policies construct another equally important, but less explored, subject: the state agency. State agencies help to “make” state borders by delineating spaces where sovereign power is exercised. They are also crucial legal subjects and targets for accountability measures. Yet, when border administration is digitalized, state agencies are fractured and reconfigured, complicating conventional accountability mechanisms. Where might we locate a domestic border control agency – through which traces, sites, and actors (human and otherwise)? This paper takes up this challenge. Drawing on a recent example from Canada, it demonstrates how the digitalization of border administration simultaneously concentrates state power while diffusing state agency (and agencies). It reflects on what this reality means for legal accountability mechanisms and for how we conceptualize who or what is responsible for decision-making when administration becomes digitalized.
About Jennifer Raso
Jennifer Raso is an assistant professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where she teaches Administrative Process and Poverty and the Law. Her research investigates the relationship between discretion, data-driven technologies, and administrative law. She is particularly intrigued by how humans and non-humans collaborate and diverge as they produce institutional decisions, and the consequences for procedural fairness and substantive justice. Raso is presently exploring these issues as the principal investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant project, “Shifting Front Lines in the Digital Welfare State: Coding Canadian Social Assistance Laws.”
Before joining McGill, Raso was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, a visiting fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project, a visiting researcher at the University of California Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, and a lawyer for the City of Toronto. She obtained an SJD from the University of Toronto, where she was a junior fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies.
An award-winning socio-legal scholar, Raso has received the Canadian Law and Society Association’s Best English-Language Article prize (2018), and the inaugural Richard Hart Prize at the University of Cambridge’s Public Law Conference (2016). Her work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the Endeavour Fellowships Program (Australia).
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Jennifer Raso