 All right, welcome, everyone. It's so nice to see you here. And just before I begin my remarks, I wanted to let you know that we're recording this event and it will be posted eventually at some point. So not immediately, but there will be a recording available just for GDPR purposes. So welcome here at King's College London, literally and virtually. We're really excited to host Karin Kotebushe and her new book, Border Frictions. I'm Alina Hoffman and I'm a final year PhD student in IR at King's College London. And I wanna begin my remarks by just thanking King's College London and the brilliant communications teams who has been helping us organize this event. And we're co-hosting this event with the Research Center in IR and the IR Ethics Research Group in the Department of Forest Studies. So thanks to Pablo and Becca if you're here. And also a really special thanks to Professor Claudia Arradau who is heading our ERC funded project, Security Flows. And you'll hear about that more in a couple of minutes. So just a few notes on the schedule and housekeeping. So you know what to expect in the next one and a half hours or so. Karin will present her book for about 40 minutes and then this will be followed by brief comments from Dr. Sarah Perret. Then we'll take several rounds of questions from a brilliant virtual audience. And you can ask a question either by using the Q&A function or raise your hand and simply speak and tell us what your questions and comments are. We also have a nice little surprise for everyone attending. Karin managed to get a nice 30% discount code for her book. Let me just pop that into the chat. Let me see. Here we go. So hopefully that's all that's appearing. It's the BF227 and you can just enter that on the Rutledge website. And that should be available for a year. So yeah, no rush, but do buy the book. It's really great. All right, so that's it for now. Now I'm going to introduce my most esteemed colleague, Sarah Perret. Sarah is going to chair and moderate this event in a couple of minutes. She's a research associate at the Department of War Studies and she's a part of our security flows project. She holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Saclet. And in her doctoral thesis, she compared the securitization and legislative changes on naturalization in Germany, the US, and France. She also spent some time at Georgetown during her doctoral studies. And then she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris on a project around risk and knowledge on societal security. And she's also still a researcher at the UNS. She also served as a parliamentary advisor at the French Parliament and as a World Bank consultant amongst many other roles. So I won't be able to do her justice. And her research interests are on critical security studies, migration, citizenship, border policies, counter-terrorism, and verification and digital devices. And she has published on all of these topics widely in French and English. So that's it for me. I'm now handing over to you, Sarah. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Avina, for this introduction. And also for helping to organize the seven today. We are indeed very pleased to have Professor Karine Coté-Boucher today for a discussion around her book, Border Frictions, Gender, Generation, and Technology on the Frontline. But before to introduce you, dear Karine, properly, I would like to tell a little bit more about the Security Flows project, since these events have been organized as part of this five-year Consolidated Grants funded by the European Research Council project. The full name of this project is enacting border security in the digital age political words of data forms, flows, and frictions. And it is led by Professor Claudia Arado here at King's College London at the Department of Water Studies. The project proposes to analyze how datification, the process of transforming our everyday lives into quantifiable digital data, is also transforming borders today. The project team develops a novel interdisciplinary framework to understand how data is generated, exchanged, and contested in border encounters, and to investigate the complex epistemic, practical, political, and ethical implications of these transformations. To do so, we are building a multimodal methodology for following the data along migration routes and tracing the production of data forms, flows, and frictions. So you understand how it is interesting to have Professor Karen Coté-Boucher today and to have the possibility to hear more about her work since her work is interesting for the project and how valuable is the book, Border Frictions, Gender Generation, and Technology on the Frontline. Before to let her the floor, I would like to introduce Karen Coté-Boucher. Dear Karen, you are originally a sociologist and anthropologist, but you are now a professor in criminology at the University of Montreal, where you teach on critical approaches to security, critical border studies, and qualitative research methodologies. Your research focuses specifically on border control, migrations, and refugees, as well as the role of customs controls in the monitoring of supply chains. You are also interested in social and political theory, and we might tell that we meet all these different literatures and influences into this book that you will present today. You also have published articles in several high-ranked journals, such as Security Dialogue, Social Politics, the British Journal of Criminology, or Theoretical Criminology. And today, it is your first book that you will present to us that brings together several years of intense research. Dear Karen, the floor is yours for 40 minutes. Thank you again for being with us today. Well, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. It's morning for me, but afternoon for you. Thank you for taking the time to attend this presentation. I have heard from both Sara and Elvina that it's very busy this week for you in IR. There are a lot of events, so I thank you very much for taking the time to be here. I also wish to thank Claudia Radao for her invitation. That's really kind of her. And also the Security Flows Project, the Research Center in International Relations. Thank you as well to Dr. Sara Perrin and to Elvina Hoffman for their work in making this event happen. So thank you to the two of you. So I'll just share my screen with you when we get started. You'll see it's a small screen, but we should be able to follow. Let me know, Elvina, could you tell me if all is good? Thank you. OK, perfect. So let's get started. So let me start my remarks with a short rendering of my conversation with William. William is an important character in my book. William was an experienced border officer, and he spent most of his career working in one port of entry located on the Eastern Canada-U.S. border. William has spent most of his career in a port of entry located on that port, and he explains to me how things have changed since he started working three decades before. So as he talks, and I spent a few hours with William, we have spent a lot of time talking to me about differences between two generations of officers, younger officers, and old officers. And he tells me younger officers now see themselves as what he called a police of the border. William was not too sure how that change came along, but he shared with me a few clues. He said, now younger officers are hired as recruits, and they are being told that they will stand against people of real bad faith. They will fight drug trafficking and crime, and find missing children. In fact, William tells me recruits are selected and trained to become law enforcers. They come to work licensed to carry a gun and expecting to catch bad guys. In contrast, experienced officers like William were hired as public servants, and they were hired to collect duties and taxes. They were gratified to take on what they saw as a protection of the national economy I won't have time to talk about that, but I've met quite a few officers who still thought that this was an important aspect of their work, even though Canada is part of a free trade agreement with the United States since 1994, even since 1988. So if someone crossed the border driving while drunk at the time, they could not arrest that person, and that made them very frustrated. They were not trained to use physical defense tactics, nor did they carry firearms or handcuffs. Older officers like to recount that when they were young, their main tool was a passport stamp. Now they carry themselves with more than 50 pounds of gear, a navy blue uniform, a bulletproof vest that makes them appear bigger than they are, and military-like leather black boots. So in my book, I asked, I wonder, I listened to William, I listened to William, William comes back in the book, right? And then I listened to him, and then I really listened to him digitally, and then I was wondering, so how did that change happen? How did Canadian border officers come to think of themselves as a police of the border? So today, I will try to present to you, and hopefully we'll have time to go through all of this, the elements that I use or that I talk about in my book, relative to border technologies and devices, and investigate how these elements can provide some answers to my question, how did we get to border officers to think of themselves as a police of the border? So today, what we'll do together, I'll first interrogate a few of our assumptions regarding seamless borders, and inquire into specific moments when imaginaries of data fluidity and everyday bordering practices collide, particularly by looking into empirical phenomena, such as data distrust, and what I call the trickle-down hypothesis. I will then speak about the growing immateriality of border control, characterized by the centralization and automation of decision-making, and how it has set the stage for the emergence of an altered sense of self for frontline border officers. I argue that as an answer to this immateriality, border officers have been embracing new law enforcement tools in a corresponding identity. I then inquire into this shift towards a more rigid and repressive understanding of border control by way of the gun. So more than computers and data flows, the slow tech device epitomizes current changes in border control in my country, at least according to the border officers I have met. And I've long wondered why it insisted so much on the role of firearms and border, given that in practice, they don't really use them or barely, right, and that's a good thing. So I offer an explanation which points to the masculinization of border control. So what I present today is based on materials gathered partly between 2010 and 11, when I conducted field work research in and around five ports of entry located at the land border in Quebec and Ontario, so in the eastern part of the country. I also carried more than 30 interviews with Canadian border officials, processing trucks and goods, so working at a customs side of the CDSA. They were supervisors, border officers, low-level targetters and intelligence, low-level intelligence analysts. They all work for the CDSA and this is important too. That's why I made a little slide for this because in some countries, these activities would be undertaken by different agencies. In Canada, it's a mega bureaucracy, it's a mega agency that takes care of customs, immigration, food and agriculture control, immigration, well, immigration control in terms of detention and deportation, so anything that has to do with the enforcement of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. So all of this is undertaken by the same organization, the CDSA. So, but my interviewees worked customs, like the one and many had done other types of border work before, such as immigration control because they move around. So it was useful because we could then compare what was different between immigration work and customs, for instance. This is completed by documentary research on publicly available materials covering border policy programs in Canada that I have gathered in the past 10 years, as well as a long-term project that I have undertaken on the Canada-US cross-border tracking industry between 2010 and 2018. So that gave me also some material to understand more what customs is doing in Canada and the United States. So according to a policy assumption, often a code in scholarship, borders would be rendered seamless by reducing human input and safeguarding a smooth circulation of data between actors that are loosely connected across the policing networks that make up borders. By virtue of this smooth circulation, this data would enable intelligence-led decision-making or as reason more argues, and I quote, risk-based security technologies appeal to an expansion of forms of knowledge that can always be rendered as actionable intelligence. And of course, so I'd like today to unpack this assumption with you by asking how does data circulate in border spaces and how actionable is this data? In view of my findings, I answered this question with a proposition that somewhat contrasts with a data of importance and interrogates anew the seamlessness of technologized borders. In doing so, I rely on David's whole for Jean de Beau in Hagiazzi, but also on Bigo's work and suggests that we contextualize how different bordering actors think about technology and use them, particularly when it comes to their social professional dispositions and their social positioning within the bordering world. So one methodological way to go about this is to inquire into points of friction where everyday bordering practices and imaginaries of data fluidity collide or shock and in turn inquire into how this experience feeds back into data collection, into circulation and into analysis. In chapter three, I review a range of issues that make data production and circulation as well as enactment of bordering decisions less certain and more fraud. Today, I will concentrate on two frictions, what I call the trickle-down hypothesis and as well as officer distrust and the validity of available data. So as I spoke with officers about the steps they took while processing truck drivers that arrived at their apartments, something surprised me. Officers do not have much access to databases when in their boots. It's changed a bit since 2015 and 16, but generally speaking what I have to say about this doesn't change, that fact doesn't change what I have to say about this. So if officers need to or wish to inquire further into a driver, often they need to send this person to the main office where a colleague would then be able to look into different databases. So my disbelief at learning about this limited data access are asked from, or at least my reading under portrayal of data circulation and border scholarship, which often speculates about the flowing of intelligence and data analysis down to parts of the entry where decisions to allow or permit entry would then be enforced. So I call this assumption the trickle-down hypothesis it's based on a mechanistic top-down reading of the dynamics of information flows in security and policing organizations which is not corroborated by research especially research on the police and policing. As we know from the works on James and Shetty Kee or that of Kerry Sanders, it's often difficult to access data in security organizations for a range of reasons, including hoarding, information silos, lack of interoperability or even just budgetary limitations that impede the acquisition of costly equipment required to accuse of such data in good ways. But in the border and context, this data access problem is furthered by two factors. The first one is efficiency. Border authorities operate customs and much of traverse surveillance under a facilitation paradigm. The objective is clear and simple. Border agencies must process billions of dollars of cargo in millions of air passengers each year. I mean border agencies worldwide, right? So following agency standards, the time spent at the booth by drivers and travelers can sell them go beyond 30 seconds at least in Canada, that's the standard, right? Accordingly, having officers search databases would represent an impediment to an expeditious management of global flows. And that's an issue that's well known to officers for years, this limited data access has been at the center of an ongoing debate between frontline officers, their union and upper city CDC management, the later being reluctant to make the necessary investments or at least from officers point of view to facilitate such access. The second factor I wish to talk about this prestige, the union's argument in favor or the officers union argument in favor of data access can also be explained by the fact that access to data provides prestige in security organizations. The datafication of borders and push for intelligence collaboration has not eliminated the hierarchical and secretive organizational culture of security agencies. For instance, difficulty of access is also compounded by the need to know principle which continues to be associated with distinct secret clearances or secret clearance levels. So for instance, as stipulated in CVSA documents and I quote, targeting officers are also limited by legislation as well as regulation and policy in the type of information that they can share with the frontline. So those who work on big data tell us that accuracy is not much valued in security organizations. That one that the validity of one data is not as much important as the intelligibility of instruments used in their analysis. Yet legitimation problems recurrently affect how that circulates and how it's involved in border decisions. One comes to the intelligibility of data from whom it has been collected as well as how and by whom it has been analyzed. Our matters debated at the frontline where data knowledge can be met with suspicion. On the one hand, if the operations of scoring tools in predictive security systems remain unknown to the general public, frontline border officers are similarly left in the dark. As a result, it is not uncommon for them to question the dependability of such analysis. On the other hand, officers are acutely aware that much of the data that leads to risk scoring and also to procure and status designations is self-declared by private actors and often not subject to verifications depends on the program, but in some programs not subject to verification and often out of date. So this lack of confidence in risk evaluations generated from criminal immigration and border crossing data appears as a common thread throughout my interviews. For instance, officers distrust may lead them to pay lip service to targeting and automated inspection recommendations, especially when that which is targeted is contradicted by their experiential risk knowledges of what to search and when. So if data led decisions are the programmatic horizon within which the frontline must operate, the level of trust in delocalized data analysis shapes whether and how algorithmic recommendations are enacted in practice. Thus showing a significant point of friction that a lab bordering where discretion is still very much alive. So let's talk about discretion just a little bit. So border officers are a core professional an occupational group that have long felt proud of their generous discretionary powers. Yet with trends such as targeting and automation, this discretion is slipping away and with it their occupational identity. So the tangible knowledge and sensitive skills that are acquired during their professional socialization now enter intention with algorithmic forms of knowing the border, but also with the facilitation logic that aims to speed up flows of cargo and people. So modulated targeting and associated malleable understandings of risk assumes a shift in frontline officers cognitive abilities. So this shift veers them towards a form of abstract thinking which takes them away from sense-based detection abilities and these sense-based detection abilities are very important to their training, but also how they see themselves, right? Their capacity to quote unquote have a sixth sense and catch bad guys, catch people lying, et cetera. Though author of the classic in the age of the smart machine, Zuboff reminds us of what we seem to have forgotten because we're so used to have technologies in our lives, right? That is how this shift from the embodied to the cognitive or what she calls in the nature of the effort from the realm of the body to the realm of thought can be profoundly disorienting and disturbing for those who experience it. To paraphrase Eric Sardin, computerized border work aims to quote unquote eradicate the sensible in bordering. That is to narrow down officers' flawed or discretionary capacity to deal with ambiguity and to come up with more variable decisions that pay attention to context and replace this capacity with forms of analysis that constrain decision by a more uniform and deadly measurements of risk. So given this, what is the role of officers now that some of their tasks and responsibilities have been taken away given to analysts or transferred even to the transportation sector and other policing institutions. So I explore this question in different ways in chapter four but let me give you a taste of that answer through a look at some of the daily impacts of the growing abstractness of border work. So let's talk about Jacob or Jacob. Jacob's story of releasing air cargo manifests how the pressures that come with the virtualization of border work are experienced. So Jacob was an officer close to retirement when we met and he had admitted that he had difficulty using computers and he was not the only one. I met quite a few border officers who admitted that they had difficulties using the computers at their disposal. And a few years before we met, Jacob started evaluating airport cargo remotely. He had yet to see one of those shipments. So for a few years he had been evaluating the risk of shipments that he had never inspected, never looked at. So he speaks of his initial confusion and discomfort and I quote him, we found it difficult at the beginning to do this at a distance where I used to having it visual in front of us. So Jacob is posted in a port of entry in a region where he grew up. He went through his career processing the same set of locally produced commodities and meeting the same truck drivers many times a week for years, some of whom he knew from childhood. Jacob is perplexed by this devaluing of local knowledge in our own decision making as well as by the shift from seeing the border as a place anchored in a network of kinship and close social ties, which still is. There's still people living at the border that hasn't changed. But also, but within border control, what you see is the shift towards a border that is viewed as a diffused extended space of flows. All of us, many of us have written about this. And so as he remotely recommends release of shipment for airports located far from the sport of entry, these decisions are dissociated from this, their context of enactment. And it fills them with a sense of unreality. The intentionability in officers work routines brought by the virtualization of border work has been increased by several policies, including those having some ports using the responsibility for electronic declarations now processed by other ports, as well as including the automation of decisions in the area of custom, especially for pre-release of trucks and goods. Taken together, these trends reinforce customs officer separation from the information entering decision making while magnifying their sense that such decisions are increasingly made elsewhere and that they have less and less say in these decisions. So accordingly, I think it's important that we should not assume an enthusiastic embrace of technologies by everyone in border agencies. In fact, my findings reveal that the experience of computer mediated border work has led many border officers to view automation and delocalization of decision making with caution. A delicate issue emerges from customs officers account of their experience of their virtualization of border work in that border. And I hesitated actually include about including this in the book. There are things I did not include in the book to protect my mindfulness and telling the story of idleness of border workers is can also raise issues, but those are also workers who are protected and have a union. So they're not gonna lose their jobs. That's why I decided I'll put it in here. But it is something that really is happening. And I saw that what idleness is unheard of in the case of border guards working in business, busy international airports, especially pre-COVID, it's not the case anymore, but until March 13th in Canada, at least it's the case. And so it is more likely to be part of everyday work in the customs sections of land part of entry. Those facing the removal of some of their prerogatives and related tasks share their frustration at being unoccupied for long stretches of time. While it varied from port to port, this inactivity appears to be one of the most tangible effects of a reduced workload due to automation and precarious. So for example, I was having a discussion with Raymond, a mid-carrier officer who was telling me jokingly, you know, I asked him, so what changed a lot since started working here? Which was like basically 20 years ago or something. And he said, oh, you know, before it took 10 people to screw the light bulb here, now it takes one. So it started laughing, he thought it was funny, but then I asked him, it's like, okay, so what do you do all day then? And he looks at me and he says, we sit around and we wait for a truck. I thought he was quite honest, but this is it. So when you look at all of these things, the tediousness that it distrusts and the feeling of powerlessness, the sense of dislocation, sense of boredom, all of this speaks to more intangible effects of disembodied border work. As I listened to officers trying to pin down the abstract character of their work and what this meant for them, it was difficult to shape, at least for me, the impression of meaninglessness that emerged from their narratives. As a result, the experience of customs at a distance could lead to potential disengagement of border officers at the frontline, and it probably does in some cases. But this is not the most significant reaction that a citizen officer's confronted with this new state of affairs. Ultimately, bordering at a distance is accompanied by the need to redefine the occupational identity of frontline personnel. Officers are in search of new ways of making sense of bordering and of their place in it. So I explained that in a longer way in the book, but what I've tried to get at is how that new sense of themselves is increasingly emerging through a reactive vision of border work. One that insists on the need to maintain a physical presence at the land border is seen as a last line of defense. And I show in chapter four how this relies on a series of strategies, including deploying a language that renders the more intuitive aspects of the job, quote unquote, scientific, reframing discretion as a response to complexity in the wake of automation and re-interpreting discretion as a symbolic wage. And I won't have time to talk about this now and we can have a longer discussion after my presentation about this if you'd like. But together, these strategies aim to re-establish concreteness in border work, but also to regain professional recognition for border officers. And they just function as new status claims in frontline bordering. And they therefore step the stage for an altered sense of self to arise. And I have found that a core element that speaks to this turn towards a more repressive understanding of border work is the gun. Let me take a sip of water. So let's start our consideration of gendered border politics with a question. Why do border officers insist that the introduction of the firearm is the most important change they have witnessed in their career? This insistence left me so confused. Some officers were convinced of this even though they were not yet armed themselves or could not be armed because they were injured and to be able to do arm training, you need to be physically fit. So there wasn't disconnect between this insistence and the ways in which also they describe the very administrative character of their work, customs work is very paper-based and computer-based but in ways of forms, but forms, right? So really, I took many, many, many walks in the woods trying to figure that one out. And so I wrote chapter five to try to understand the place that the gun took in officers view of themselves, of their bodies, their work and of the border. And I argue in this chapter that arming is part of what Rewind Connell calls a project of masculinity, which brings into bordering the more conventional understandings of manhood associated with guns. In Canada, the officers respond to their demotion in status and authority as come to rely on one of a Germanic masculinity's most traditional in the symbol, the gun. This is significant because these legitimate means of violence, at least when they are used by state officials are embedded with potent gendered meanings. I also see armed bordering as a straight channel for what Wendy Brown calls the masculinism of the state. That is, and I quote her, features of the state as signify, enact, sustain and represent masculine power as a form of dominance. And of course, sort of cut too fast. In Canada, the officers response to, sorry, so as technical know-how is increasingly brought into border control. So we know, we study technologies. So technologies in borders are ubiquitous, but they also deploy forms of dominations that are associated with the high tech world and the knowledge economy. That's also something that we could definitely look into through a lens of gender border politics. And I didn't do that in the book because I needed to talk about the gun, but I think someone else should be doing it since we, but the idea here is that despite this, despite that form of domination through high tech, right? The firearm provides a different mode of legitimation for frontline border work. And that legitimation has less to do with controlling at a distance the flows of people, goods and money, then with reframing the border as the last line of defense to be protected against bad guys through sheer strength and firepower. So in the book, I suggest that our main contributed to the masculinization of border work in Canada. But how does one make border work masculine? I say that there's work that needs to be done to gender the border at border work as masculine type of work. So I provide three different answers throughout the book. First of all, it can go through a change of perception of what border work should be about. Secondly, it can be working through gendered constructions of authority and competence. And thirdly, it can go through altering officers embodiment through law enforcement tools. Today, I'll speak to the first of these elements. So the change in the perception of border work away from a tax and duties collection job and away from the cultural norms, the gendered cultural norms that sustain that perception. So the story I tell in chapter five starts with how officers have come to adopt a gendered tape on the recent history of bordering in Canada, citing not the computer, but the firearm as an emblem of the transition, which took them from a feminized past of bordering with the, that's how we talk about it, made of administration and taxation to a present or more masculine, stronger, tougher president of security in law enforcement. A few officers told me such gendered accounts of change when they tried to explain how their work had transformed. So let's look at what Nathan told me. So I'm gonna quote you a longer excerpt of a conversation I've had with Nathan who is an experienced border officer. So Nathan tells me, it's not at all like what it used to be. So I asked him, no, what was it like before? He says, well, I'm pretty, well, one of our ministers, Eleanor, Eleanor can't remember her last name. She called us grocery clerks. So I say, oh, Kaplan, grocery clerks. Nathan answers, she said, well, Canada customs is just no more than grocery clerks or bank clerks or something like that. We just collect duties and taxes. That's it. We don't do enforcement, drunk drivers. We just ask them not to drive. Just park your car in secondary. We'll get you a cab. Yes. So everything has changed since I've been here. So I say, I'll computerize, right? And he's like, yeah, I computerize everything now. Guns, duty belt, officer powers, power to restrooms, everything. And not that last sentence, that enumeration of enforcement tools to talk about the transformation of bordering came back in so many of my interviews and that enumeration changed. Sometimes guns were always there, but blue uniform, handcuffs, control tactics. But every time they wanted to talk about what had changed in their work, they talked about their bodies and what they carried on their bodies and what they were trying to use, that concrete material they were using on an everyday basis. So in what Nathan was telling me, he's recalling a 2002 episode, so it's dating, it's 18 years now, involving then federal customs and revenue minister. So the CBSA was created in 2003. That's just before the creation of the CBSA and customs, was there for an agency placed under their revenue ministry. Now, since 2003, the CBSA is under the responsibility of public safety in Canada, which also tells you a little bit about how border became a security matter. But nevertheless, in 2002 and before, customs was a responsibility for the revenue minister, who was at the time Elinor Kaplan, under whose authority many of my interviewees worked at the time. So Minister Kaplan's comments about bank clerks, so the term she used was bank clerks, were made in the context of her directive to let armed and dangerous individuals, that's a category in bordering in Canada in border enforcement. So armed and dangerous individuals into the country, since border officers were not armed and thus considered improperly equipped to intervene in such situations. Following these comments, the officers union received a deluge of phone calls from angry members, complaining of being compared to simple clerical workers. So the minister's observation generated outrage precisely because working as a bank teller is known to be a feminine occupation. The trope of the bank teller exemplifies in the minds of many a clear gender segregation of jobs in the service industry. So in their bid to secure their position as chief border control actors and obtain pay increases and better working conditions, and they did get that after 2006, when the gun policy was adopted, then the union renegotiated better working conditions. All of this I described in that chapter, I won't have time to talk about it, but it's important that guns are about social status, okay, and about material benefits. And so officers in their union have used army as a strategy to take a distance from this clerical image, rather insisting on the dangers they might face at the border and boasting of their crime control credentials. They have succeeded in convincing politicians and border high officials that these weapons were necessary to their work. And firearms started being introduced for border officers in 2007, and that is still ongoing. To quote Carlson, who did research on private gun ownership in the US, and I quote her, what guns did protect against was a gendered threat, the threat of falling down the masculine hierarchy. And of quote, my interviews, as well as analysis of the union's position on arming, suggests that this masculinization of the purpose, practices and material culture of border work is intimately linked to efforts to raise officers' occupational profile. In short, arming aimed to recast the public perception of border officers, but also their own, both in terms of a newly self-escribed gender subject position as law enforcers, and in relation to their efforts to project themselves as still relevant border actors. In turn, that strategy and those gender narratives have made it easier for border authorities, as well as the general public in Canada to imagine border work as a tougher and more physical endeavor. So I've been talking for a little while. It's time to stop. So just to conclude very quickly, I make some conceptual interventions in my book in relationship to what I've just told you. You'll be able to find that and read a little more about it in chapter one of the book. And you can also ask a bit of questions about this if you're interested. I thank you very much for your time and your quality of listening. And I look forward to discuss with you now. Thanks. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Kain, for this particularly exhaustive presentation of all this work. I would like to start by saying how I really enjoyed reading this book. I have to admit it is difficult not to be impressed by all the data collected, whether it is in the number of interviews and participant observation with Canadian border officers you have conducted or whether it is reading the legislation on taxation, regulation or administration at the border. So I will comment and try to raise some questions regarding what I find very interesting in the book. I have many questions, but of course I will try to be quick in order to let people to ask questions as well, of course. So I really liked the way that you really demystify here what border work is in everyday practices agents by showing how border work is inserted in this complex sociotechnical, organizational and infrastructural arrangements that faces to a lot of different kinds of frictions. And the friction concept reminds us how it is methodologically important to collect different knowledge and observe what is ignored and used in everyday practices and how those everyday practices are also entangled with the implementation of what you call low tech new tools such as guns. And I agree with your observation that critical literature on technology sometimes forget that digitalization, sorry. It's not the only objects we should focus on. I'm coming back to this friction concept that you borrow from Anthony. You are observing frictions in five aspects of border work that you have presented, technologies, unions, gender, professional socialization and generations. And I find particularly interesting how those aspects play a role on the power relations into this field of border work and how some dispositions would provide more legitimacy in their interaction first between them, second was their line management and third was the clients or the truck drivers, for instance. I wonder though, and that could be probably my first question here, how race or at least stereotypes related to origins play a role in these relationships. Did you observe some differences of behavior regarding these aspects, such as you have been able to identify clearly differences in terms of age or gender? Through the entire book, you describe precisely all the process of customs, practices, sometimes through what you have been able to observe directly, sometimes through the descriptions of the main stakeholders of these processes. These two ways allow to catch probably more precisely the reality of practices than just having testimonies or just observations, but both ways are facing difficulties of field work access. And it is here my second question. How did access this field work? What were your strategies here and how these ways of accessing this field affected your interaction with the field and its actors? I guess as an anthropologist, this is a question that you have kept in mind during your... I don't know, yeah. Okay, well, good questions and you might not know, but they are interconnected. Exactly, I'm sure. Because when I started the research or when I tried to start the research, I developed the research project to look at customs and not immigration control because I thought I would never get research access or it would be difficult to. Also because at the time, Anna Pratt, who is a really good social, social legal scholar in Canada, has already worked, had all been worked on race and risk knowledges at the border and I wanted to steer away from that and want to get into her territory, Jewish, right? So those are the two reasons why I didn't have a lot of access to how border decisions integrate stereotypes, racialized stereotypes, for instance. I can tell you though, from later research with truck drivers, I've spoken with Sikh truck drivers, so South Asian truck drivers from the Sikh community who are, I don't know whether that's the case in Europe but in Canada, there's a niche for truck driving for Sikh truck drivers. So in Ontario and in British Columbia and a bit in Montreal as well, actually. And I was talking with them and then they were telling me, oh, everybody has had a story at the border with border officers, right? Treating them badly. And I was like, this is interesting because I've interviewed 50 people before you and no one tells me this. And they say like, really? Like, yeah. So Sikh truck drivers. And I said, so those are your friends and are your friends, friends who are telling you this, are they Sikh? And they say, yeah, they are. So they're all South Asians. Yeah. And so the experience at least of my, of my interviewees or the clients, right? Is really racialized, but we know this. We know this, right? This is not something B. This is not, you know, but there are elements here where doing research on these things at the border, I think we need to look at it from the perspective of clients, of the perspective on border process, but they are clients as well, especially the truck drivers. You know, there's a dynamic of private companies as well, wanting their commodities to go through borders quickly. So that also has an impact. But anyway, that's another research project, but that's also to answer your question, right? Now, in terms of research access, well, you mentioned I'm an anthropologist by training. I still think that despite globalization, we still all live in a village. And we do, like most of us in the world, if you really, if you read even the research about how many people we know and in which area of the world they live, it's generally around 100 kilometers from where we live, right? And so my research strategy used that and used networks and family networks. And I basically took two years at the beginning of my PhD and I've been annoying with everybody I've met asking them, do you know anybody who works for the CVSA? So parties, family gatherings, Christmas, anything. I ask everybody. And I finally, two contacts panned out, one through my in-laws, extended family. But I will tell you this because it's important. I don't know if you're listening right now, but I think it's important. It's like, a lot of people ask me, oh, should I write a letter to the CVSA or to the US CBP? I'm like, no, that's the last thing you should be doing. You have to find people who trust you, right? And people will trust you if they know your mother. I'm sorry to say this, but that's still the way it is, right? And so through my in-laws, in a really extended family, someone in that extended family had gone to high school with a border officer, put me in contact with him. And he said, oh, yeah, that looks awesome. Let me put you in contact with my chief of operation and I went to meet him. And he had a friend who had done a PhD research in anthropology in Peru and therefore he thought, oh, I'm gonna help the student here, right? And the second way I got research access was through a friend or a colleague of my mother whose father was a border officer, right? So, and then these people had helped me then get a proper authorization. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to do that research without at least the provincial regional direction agreement or approval. So I got that. And that also had an impact. Ask you about, not only you asked me about strategies, but how it affected my interactions, yeah. Sincerely, so for the past 10 years, I lived in fear. Because I was wondering whether I would eventually lose access or if the CDSA would be saying, you can't publish this or you see. So it always stayed in the back of my mind, yeah, definitely. And it had, we have to admit, it had an impact on how I wrote my dissertation, how I wrote different papers. I've tried to be very nuanced and careful and also kind to the people who have been generous enough to spend time to talk to me, right? But yeah. Thank you for your answer. I still have other question, but maybe I will let the floor to the person who wants to ask a question. Avina, is there a question? Yeah, I think we already have two questions by Claudia Aradau. Claudia, I don't know if you wanna come in live or if you want me to read your question out loud, if there's a way for you to come in now. I think, yes, I think I hear. Would you like, did you, I think you or Claudia? Claudia, Claudia, okay. Hi, so I think you might hear me, can you hear me? Yeah, yes. Okay, brilliant, hi, Corinne and thank you so much for the talk. Yeah, it was amazing. And a bit like Sarah, I also have a lot of questions, but I'll try to restrain myself a little bit. So one of my questions that also maybe resonates is Sarah's earlier comments was about the concept of friction which I found really exciting and there is a bit of work, but not so much engaging with the concept of friction. And I was wondering about how you use the concept and because you said that you chose frictions, right? And I was wondering what work the concept did for you in the book, particularly as for instance, if we take data distrust as one side of friction, I was wondering why is data distrust friction because somebody could, I mean, the board officers could distrust data but do nothing about it, right? So then there isn't necessarily friction. And the second point was about how you kind of tackled it, what I saw as a kind of contradiction between this image of immaterial borders through virtualization, computerization, ratification, almost like the lightness of borders on the one hand and the kind of materialization of borders through all this gear that you started with, the gun, the heavy gear, right? So we have this very different, you know, representations. And I was wondering, are these the representations that the board officers are giving you? Because in a sense, digitization, computerization is also a materialization, right? It comes with particular experts, people who need to do the data work with devices, the computer is a device with kind of data storage, I assume, also files and so on. Yeah, so I was wondering about this, if you could say more about these contradictions but also potentially different materialization and for whom? Thank you for your audience. We have two more questions. Let's take them this round and then we'll let you answer and then we open up for another round. So I have Martina Tatsioli, do you want to come in? Yeah, it's fine. Can you hear me? Okay. Hi, thanks a lot for the wonderful presentation. I haven't read the book yet, so I cannot comment on it. But from what you said, I was wondering if you can say something more about, well, the first question is connected to what Claudia just asked. So it's not specifically about the concept of friction, but in general, you explain the fact that data circulation is not smooth and that there are always interruption, right, border interruption. And I was wondering, because there is a growing literature around interruption, friction, disruption in data circulation. And now politically and conceptually, what do you do with that, right? So after noticing and highlighting these frictions or interruption, what is relevant for you, right? So what is at stake? What shall we get from that, from this interruption? Where does it go, this? Because interruption can be also counter-strategic for, I mean, I'm speaking about migrants, you're not necessarily about migrants, even customs or people in general, across the board that is not just an interruption of our power function, but at the same time, yeah, I was wondering what do you do with this analysis? And the second question is about, so you engage with this, but you explained to us very well this partial immaterialization of border work and this disappearance of the body. And I was wondering if in the book you say something, so not only about the gender dimension, but the fact that actually this, not only these bodies are there, but there is a restructuring in the labor economy of the border. So of the way which, of the kind of labor that these people perform that is constantly invisibleized and not only their labor as people who police the borders, but also as people who were part of the labor economy. So what about this dimension? And the third and final point is about your level of analysis. So do you think that this technologization of borders is something that is at play only at that level that you investigated or that as well? No, keep going, I'm sorry. Because then it depends on the research side, but for instance, in some of the research I've done, I can understand that there is also a lot of non-technological borders that is a mesh with this technologization. So it depends really which people you interviewed. Great, thank you. Let's take those questions for now because I think there are a lot of questions more than three and then we'll open the second round with Mireille Paquet and some more questions just pop them in the Q&A, otherwise I will just ask my questions. Okay, so questions about friction and data circulation. No, it's true, like there's not always frictions. That is of course, like sometimes you do not, you see that they will, for example, border of Susset, I get a targeting recommendation and then I think it's stupid, but I'll implement it, like I'll go, I'll do it. But where the friction happens is how I will do it, right? I'll do it by opening one box instead of five. I'll do it by taking my time. I'll do it by not paying attention too much, right? Or I will just not do it that much, right? Then it can happen in ways where the friction can be in ways where the friction can happen. For instance, I saw that in one port, while I saw, I heard about it in one port. So at the time there were systems of that pre-cleared automatically 50 to 60% of trucks and commodities that went through ports of entry. That's what happens in customs, right? Most of these things are now automatically evaluated, and not by people, right? Just by systems, so there's an algorithm that works. And at the time it was done by ports of entry. And so by one person, a border officer would apply for that job and say, I wanna be a low-level analyst and I want to deal with that pre-clearing system that deals with what happens at my port. And at that specific port, what happened is for an entire year the border officer was in charge of that system, was overwhelmed, you couldn't cope. And so everything that system was basically out of date for more than one year, you couldn't enter new data in it. And so what happens to those systems is that after a while, they will therefore provide targeting material to officers on the ground, but the officers are using targeting, forms of targeting that are out of date that just, they don't have, there's no link to the reality. So what I'm trying to say is that these systems are in friction with reality in a way that is they can, or they can become so, they can create their own autopoyeric reality, their own self-referential reality. And I think that is extremely dangerous. We should pay attention to this, we should actually investigate this. That these systems, like we know like a Madame Tazini which is like, I read your work shows that very well that it's, this does not happen in real time. And so all decisions are being made on the basis of information that is not verified, often old, often repetitive, often even with mistakes, lots of mistakes in data entry. And so there's the friction here between us, cross borders and these systems who are creating another reality through risk rationalities, right? So that's one friction between us and those systems. And I think we should pay attention to that. I mean, there's lots of other examples, but I think that one is, I hope I was clear in my explanation, but I think that one is an important one. And so the, their self-referential aspect of those systems is one element that I think we need to start talking and thinking about. Claudia, you asked another question about the materiality of borders. Are we the different forms of materialization and that digitalization also involves a material component? Yeah, and you can see it of course in the work, the daily work of border officers. When they told me, you know, before we had those types of papers that we had to deal with, now we spend six hours in front of computer screens to process forms, right? And so there's a new materiality in the work. This being said, I was more interested in what made sense to them and what types of materialities made up their symbolic world. And computers was not that. It was their, what the materiality of their lives on a daily basis was law enforcement tools and what they looked like and how they felt as embodied subjects. And it doesn't mean that that's more important. And I'm not saying this is more important as a form of materiality, but it is an important one that we have not paid enough attention to. I think. And it's important when we talk about how policing enforcement but also militarization of borders is happening everywhere. It's also happening through this, that sense of the self that is increasingly going towards materialities that are relative to the work of policing or even the work of the military. And just one last thing, your question about levels of analysis in technologies and where it's happening, and yes, you're right. That is what I'm talking about is looking at what's happening at the frontline level and the title of the book because I wanted to make sure that this was really understood. And so if we look at the work of other people who have looked at people who worked at the targeting level or even people who have worked on the development of border technologies, I'm thinking of the work of Bourn-Lyle and Johnson on the labor ties in the border. You see that there are these different levels of people with different credentials, different credentials, different social dispositions and they will have all different understandings of the border of technologies and of the way and they will also interact with technologies very differently and they will have different knowledges relative to technology as well. So, yeah, I hope I've been answering correctly about your question, thank you. Thank you, what a great round of questions. We already have three more questions Karine, so get ready for another round. Mireille Paquet, do you want to come in or shall I just read out your question? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, great. Thank you Karine for a great presentation. It's very complex but also very soothing the way it's presented and the work is obviously fascinating with deep engagement with the actual lived experience of the border agents. And so, thank you for that. My question has to do with what your work can tell us about the changing nature of administrative structures associated with border enforcement. So, you documented a period of change in Canada's CBSA but I mean we've seen that in several other countries with those agencies moving either becoming autonomous or being merged with other agencies. Yeah, so I just would like you to tell us beyond Canada I think that the book really documents that but what can the results and what can your book tell us about the impact of the evolution of these structures. Great, thank you. Next I have Didier Bigaud. Didier, do you want to come in? Hello. Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, hello Karine. I'm sorry, I didn't listen to all the lecture but I had the advantage to read the book. I wanted to ask you one of the questions concerning the lived experience of the border guards and the fact that in fact in some of my interviews I've seen the border guards not only at the ground level but more and more at other levels where they were not previously. You have now an agreement between the five eyes country on migration. And it's a memorandum of understanding but different ministries which are in charge very often interior but sometimes really the one on migration share elements and share strategy at the ground level. And so it's often different channels than the ones of border guard which was like that but it seems that more and more they are meeting together. So you have a visa mixed of meetings where you have a top border guard, really online one of some big airport or local communities discussing with the intelligence community. So do you know about that in Canada? Or have you seen the memorandum of understanding of the difference? No, I'll answer after. Thanks. Thank you so much, Didier. And last a really long question by Miguel Iglesias Lopez that you want to come in and maybe ask it live, Miguel? Just unmute yourself, Miguel? I can read them so I can answer after that it's on my screen. He has a microphone, all right. Okay, that's fine. I'll let you, yeah, it's probably easier if you read it than you're reading it out loud. Okay, great. First the question on changing the changing nature of administrative structures. But that's something that I'm learning with Mireille. Mireille is a friend, she's mine, she's here as a moral support. She's also a really important political scientist in Canada and she knows way more about the administrative structures than I do. Listen, Mireille, I think what we're seeing is the evolution of border structures towards either a mandate of security or a mandate of policing or a mandate of military, a mandate that is military. And at the same time a mandate of facilitation. And I'd say that in general the facilitation mandate is happening everywhere and it's entering in intention with the other mandate. In Canada, in the law, in the customs law, the mandate of Canadian CBA is facilitation and security. But the way that has been understood at the administrative level is interesting because even if we speak a lot about security, a lot of money, a lot of the budgets that are being stamped in Canada on bordering actually are spent on trade and passenger facilitation, including in terms of technologies to make that happen more quickly. So in terms of structures, what you're seeing as well in Canada and in some areas is first a transfer of some responsibilities that were understood as immigration responsibilities to a border agency like the CDSA. So those responsibilities being those of the immigration ministry before the creation of agencies like the CDSA or what you're seeing as well is a trans, I'd say a tumbling down of the responsibility for a lot of things in customs and in immigration to private and public actors, but lower, lower than the federal level, either at the provincial or at the municipal level. You see that in Canada, you see that elsewhere. And that has an impact on how, for instance, these private organizations, not for profit from the private, I mean, transportation industry, for instance, will have interactions with these border structures in terms of data exchange, but also in terms of public organizations like the police having, we see that in Montreal, for instance, having exchanges of data between the CDSA and police municipality, small exchanges, but especially on immigration status. So what you're seeing is a recomposition, I think, of the relationships between border agencies and lower levels of decision making, but also with private sector and the civil society in general. And I think that's not only Canadian. I think we've seen, we're seeing it in the U.S., for instance, and the work of Dolis-Marie Profin is really good on this. Didier, I had not heard about this. You are my go-to person for anything, you're 5I and intelligence-related. But you talked about the lived experience of border guards and how we see these people going up from an experience as border officer and grow up. And actually, in Canada, this is no longer the case. That is before it wasn't, you could see border office no longer, less the case. You could see border officers before, or those who are called customs officers, go up the hierarchy all the way to Ottawa and have more administrative positions. You see that less now. People who work in Ottawa in administrative positions for the CDSA have master's degrees and are hired directly from universities. This being said, it'd be interesting to see that mid-level management in airports and what happens there. But you know, I'd like to say something about this because another thing, you know that, at least in Canada, to become a targeter, you don't necessarily need to have such a good understanding of data and technologies. You can, for instance, become a low-level analyst if you've been injured on the job and you need to be positioned somewhere because you are unionized and you are therefore deserving to keep your job. And so some of those positions that analyst positions are actually filled by former border officers not on the basis of necessarily qualification but on the basis of need, the needs of these injured workers. So that's something also to think about in terms of data flows and smoothness of borders. Could you send me the link to the memorandum of understanding if you have it? I'd love to have a copy of that document. It'd be great. Thanks. But the last thing, ministries at the higher level, you see that Canada and the Netherlands, for instance, are exchanging a lot on pre-clearance programs right now and developing one in conjunction. But that's happening at a higher level. Canada is always keen to develop more pre-clearance technologies in programs. So that's something that could be interesting to look at as well. So I'm going to read the question by Professor Lopez. Why do I use the word programmatic? Foucault's program. So Foucault says, you know, there's a program and there's a reality or things never happen as it was said in the program. And that's why it's so interesting to study, right? That is, of course, there's a vision, there's a horizon that technologies and automation especially and centralization is supposed to make decision-making smoother at the border. It's supposed to make it less discretionary and supposed to help border officials across the globe be less corrupt, go faster in decision-making and therefore facilitate flows. But what I'm trying to show is that that's a program in Foucault's sense. And we need to look at practices and we need to look at how this unfolds, not in reality, how this unfolds in the relationship between that program and when data emerge and practices emerge and how they collide, like these practices in that program collide together and the friction between those two things creates something. And that's what I'm interested in. So that also gets back to Claudia's question about the friction, right? This is the friction. The friction is not between theory and reality. It's between a program that imposes pressures on people and how people interact with this, but also how this influences the circulation of data. And you see, it took me a while to answer your question, Claudia reported, but getting there. Okay, second question. I need to read it because I haven't had time. And Miguel said that this was actually already answered as it was linked to Claudia's question. Okay, perfect. Let's take maybe another 10 minutes because we have a few questions left and we're allowed to use this virtual Zoom room a little bit longer, but then there's another meeting. So I have Georgios Glufzius. Do you want to come in and ask your question live? Georgios? Yes, hello. Can you hear me? Yeah. So I actually read the book and I really found it fascinating and beautifully written. So I have two questions. One is related to what Martina said before. The other one is related to the transportation industry. So the first question is like, besides contesting dominant discourses about seamlessly working supposedly smart borders, why is it politically important to attempt to border friction? So what are the politics of research into friction? This is the first question. Why is it important in terms of critique, in terms of the ways that we come to understand the power to control mobilities and so on. Now, the second question is like you mentioned before that the responsibility for enacting security is often transferred from customs officers to the transportation industry. And I was wondering what are the dangers of this trend? What do you think? Thank you very much. It was really great. I'll use my role as a chair to ask two more questions from my side. And I only read the introduction that was on the Rutledge side. But from what I found, you really had to do a lot of kind of reflexive work after you've conducted your fieldwork, right? Because you start your book with an acknowledgement of how you actually really liked the actors you were dealing with, right? And you just own it and really like it. And there's no need to vilify them for no reason in a sense. So I was wondering whether you could reflect on your strategies of reflexivity and how you managed to deal with this material and with their own kind of legitimizing discourses and how to distance yourself from this and really analyze this from the perspective that you did. And then maybe a second question. In the interviews you conducted and in the book, are there ever any references to their counterparts on the other side of the border, so to speak? Because obviously there are other border guards on the other side, but it seems like they're only kind of referring to generations within the same regime in a sense. So I was just wondering about this kind of relation. Okay, are there any other questions? One final, that's the final round. So if you have anything to ask or to add, please let us know. I have many other questions, but I will send my questions to you directly, Karin. So about the political question, this is such an important one, one that I'm still thinking about. Probably I'll be thinking about that until I die. I'm very, very pessimistic about the political change in bordering. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to say that. But let's take this question about the political and critique. So first critique. In the book, in the first chapter, I wrote a note. And there are a revertible Tanski to sit at our different levels of critique. And I decided to use a humble level of critique. One that is related to looking at what border agencies or institutions of power are telling us about what they're doing in our name and for us. And going through sociological description to show that this is not what's happening. Right. And so this is not about resistance and this is not about going into streets to do demonstrations, but this is an approach that that border agencies don't like. And that's also an approach that we have perhaps we do not realize that perhaps enough. How disruptive that approach is. Because it speaks to the core of the experience of workers. I have border workers. I considered them border workers in the book. It speaks to the fact that while they're telling it while border management is telling us and politicians are telling us or whatever, when we're being told that technologies work well and that's how we are being kept safe, right? And that on a daily basis, these technologies just don't work. Or they don't work the way they're supposed to. Or they're getting older and they break. And there's no money to fix them. And so there's that dream of the border that is so secure. And there's a reality of it. That is much more complicated. And I find that that's one way to look at it. One other way to look at it, of course, is that once you see all these holes. In. That. That very smooth understanding of what the border is. There might be room for different forms of alliances. Different forms of. Also different types of political struggles. Before I went to do the research. I didn't even think about the importance of firearms and guns. Right. And I think that's because border officers told me about this. And now I realized how important this is. And maybe I don't know in the UK how important firearms is, but in North America right now that firearms are. A real huge issue, right? Especially with the extreme right. And I think that it would be a bit too long to, to talk about this, but politically to have to give more firepower to different organizations like the CDC, like the police, like you see it. That is this to me is a political problem. It's important. We've added. We've added thousands of guns in our society. Canada is not a heavily armed. Place, but the US is. And so this brings up new political challenge. Other political questions, right? That are perhaps not, of course, it brings up other political questions around immigration and stuff, but those we know that's why I'm not talking about this, right? But I think that the research with people and their experience opens up new political questions and, and new political challenges that we need to face. I think like, at least in North America, I talk about guns and maybe in Europe it's less important, but for us with Trump and everything, it's becoming quite an issue. Yeah. Yeah, the political question just will, it will haunt me until this, my research days will be over. And rapidly on the transportation industry, the dangers of the transfer actually for the transportation industry, a lot of the responsibilities are not a transfer, but they've been created by. By the CBS or in the US and the US custom border protection. So, so these are new responsibilities that are roughly 20 years old. And it's been developed to do integrate the transportation industry within the secureization of supply chains. And the dangers about it are so important. I don't have time to talk about all of them at all. I'll tell you one. Right now, and for the past 20 years, the US has sovereignty on two Canadian soil into truck, transportation, trucking in this transportation or transportation companies yards because of pre-clearance programs. If you want to be able to have access to pre-clearance programs in the US for the US programs, you need to let US border representatives visit your company and you need to provide a lot of information. That can be quite private, but also commercially sensitive information to us, speaking the Homeland Department, the Department of Homeland Security to be able to go. So in terms of sovereignty, but in terms also of what this means for the trucking industry and therefore for workers. For truck drivers. This is quite problematic, but we can have a longer conversation about that. And rapidly, around your question about reflexivity was so interesting, Alvina, but I think we were going to not have enough time. But in terms of, because the last one I can answer very quickly, references to US border guards. Yeah, it was always in the background. And basically it, what the background was, US border officers get respect and we want to become like them. So let's, let's become law enforcers. Let's become tougher. And therefore nobody will give us. Try it. Nobody will, will question our, our authority anymore. Right. So, yeah, yeah. So you, you, you, the US was there. There's more to say about it. Unfortunately, I think we're, we're going to be out of time, but I'd be happy to have a longer conversation with you. Thank you. I'll pass the word back to Sarah, who will rapidly wrap up. Thanks for everyone who's still with us. We're really excited. Such an amazing discussion. Yeah, well, thank you so much. Karen for, for this brilliant presentation and your, all the response that you, you, you provide today. Again, it's, it's a very fascinating book. And as I said earlier, I'm very impressed by all the work that you, you were able to, to, to bring together into this book. I also wanted to, to, to thanks a lot. Alvina Hoffman for chairing this, this event and, and again, helping to organize this online presentation. And also, of course, I would like to, to thank the, the school of, of security studies at King's College London, who has been a great help to, to communicate on the event. Well, I think this is the end. Thank you again, Karen. I wish you the best for the book. And hopefully we will be able to meet in person really soon. That would be lovely. It would be lovely. So thank you to all of you for, for organizing and thank you for the rest of you for your, your great questions and, and for being here. And I look forward to meeting you in person for, for those of you, I don't know yet. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to the participants as well. And for the great questions.