 Wednesday lunchtime seminar series of our New Voices in Global Security seminar series here at the School of Security Studies. My name is Dr. Amanda Chisholm and I am the organizer and chair of this series. For those of you who aren't familiar, the series itself is designed to raise the visibility and amplify the expertise of our PhD and post-doc and broader ECRs across the School of Security Studies. Today we are so pleased to welcome Dr. Lucrezia Kenzuti. The title of Lucrezia's talk is Collecting, Assembling, Ordering, Borders, Asylum, and the Invisible Labor of Data. Lucrezia is a research associate at the Department of War Studies here at King's College, London. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of York. Her past research focuses on migration to and within the global south, citizenship studies, and ill-liberalism. Currently, Lucrezia has a post-doc on the project Security Flows that's funded by ERC and led by Professor Claudia Arodao. Lucrezia today is joined by two discussants, so we're sure to have some great conversation. The first one is Dr. Saskia Staszewicz, who is an FWF Senior Research Fellow and Senior Visiting Researcher at CEU, as well as principal investigator of the FWF project, Risky Borders, Gender and Race in EU Border Security. The second discussant is Dr. Martina Tasioli. Martina is a lecturer in politics and technology at Goldsmith University, and her work explores the biopolitical mechanisms by which some subjects are racialized and governed as migrants, analyzing the intertwining of modes of objectification and subjectivities. Recently, she's investigated the technologization of border regimes and how technologies constitute a battlefield for migrants, states, and non-state actors. So without further ado, and so I can stop talking so we can get on to really what we're here to see. Lucrezia has agreed to talk for about 30 minutes for which then we'll move straight into the discussant's comments, questions, and feedback. Again, audience members, if you have any questions or comments or anything to ask, please again feel free to raise your hand if you want to ask it live or pop it in the chat box and I'll ask it to Lucrezia. But yeah, without further ado, Lucrezia, I'm handing the virtual floor over to you. Thank you so much, Amanda, and thank you for having me here. So yeah, today I'm going to present a paper titled, Collecting, Assembling, Ordering, Borders of Salam and Invisible Work of Data. And it's a paper that I'm writing with Claudia Aradão and it's very much a work in progress, so feel free to give comments, any comments are very much welcome. So before I start talking about the paper, perhaps it's useful to give you an overview of the project security flows and which I'm working on so that you know where the paper sits. So Security Flows analyzes how datafication, the process of transforming everyday lives into quantifiable data is also transforming borders and security today. So some of you may have followed Anna's presentation a couple of weeks ago, Anna talked about the use of AI at the border and the collection of data at the border, and this paper is related to that but looks at a different side of data collection, because there's been a lot of attention around the extraction of data at the border from migrants. But less is known about the data that migrants themselves have to collect in order to substantiate their asylum claims. So once they are in the country of destination. So here we understand data in a very broad sense, a lot of the literature focuses on digital data whereas we're expanding this understanding and looking at both digital and and analog data for example in the form of certificates photographs reports and so on. So looking at data from from this angle, allows us to show how justification doesn't doesn't stop at the border but but stretches throughout the asylum process so it's not just that migrants have to give the fingerprints or biographic details at the border but for years, people are repeatedly asked to provide data about themselves their bodies their relationships that their beliefs in order to demonstrate that they deserve protection that they are genuine asylum seekers right. And this process takes a lot of work, and it is this this work that we want to draw attention to in this paper and by the way we're also developing developing an art project with with Somerset house on this on this particular team theme. So what we hope to do is, is show that the asylum is not a passive process where people are just waiting and of course waiting is important as asylum seekers themselves and scholars have pointed out but it also entails continual invisible work that that includes resources, including money, effort and time. So to build this argument. We draw an interview with immigration lawyers and also archival material from asylum appeal cases from from Italy and the UK. So it's with two of these cases that I would like to start this this presentation so these are two asylum appeals that resulted in in opposite decisions. And the first one refers to a Kurdish asylum seeker who applied for asylum in the UK on the basis of his sexuality and his case and I'm reading from the appeal. And I believe that the appellant had done nothing to substantiate his claim except provide a few pictures of him in a gay bar. And there's more selection of Facebook pages and messages showing sexual pictures and conversations. And here the judge is quoted. It is tried to say that someone can attend a gay bar and participate in the exchange of explicit photographs and messages without being gay, but instead to support a false basis for claiming asylum. So the first case refers to an asylum seeker who applied in Italy on the basis of his political engagement in Pakistan. And his account was judged to be entirely coherent, extremely rich in detail, and offering numerous elements of external confirmation that fully corroborate his testimony. This is quite a long quote so I'm just going to highlight the main points because what is interesting to us is that this appellant was able to convince the judge of his credibility. There are different types of data both analog and digital so you have his daughter's identity card and birth certificate party membership card and letters photographs tax returns. And he was also asked to identify and successfully identified 11 different locations pertaining to his testimony on on Google Maps. The outcomes of the first and the second share second case show that data can make the difference between a positive decision and a rejection in asylum claims. And in fact, although both you and UK law states that claim and testimony should be sufficient to grant asylum in reality can be quite difficult to obtain refugee status without any supporting documentation or evidence and this is especially true in the UK. There is a lot of literature that that has paid attention to this and to what are defined as the cultures of suspicion fostered around the testimonies of asylum seekers. But there has been less attention to the work that asylum seekers themselves need to do in turn in order to turn their lived experiences into data. So we need to connect to two different sides of asylum governance, the processing of asylum claims and the question of work. And we argue that asylum seekers are increasingly performing the invisible work of data by collecting, assembling and ordering and making legible different forms of digital and analog and analog data to support their cases. In doing this we supplement to bodies of literature related to migration and asylum. So on the one hand that the critical literature on data extraction, which has focused on how migrants and refugees are forced to give data in order to access humanitarian resources and to be able to make a claim for protection. And, well, Claudia Aradão and Martina as well have written extensively on this. And on the other hand you have the literature on asylum and labour, which has paid particular attention to the conditions of unemployment and free and exploitative labour precarity and destitution among asylum seekers. So I don't have time to go into, into much detail in terms of the literature, but for example asylum seekers experiences of unfree and exploitative work have been discussed quite a lot in the literature. As you know in the UK asylum seekers can't work until they have, while they're waiting for a decision even though there's been discussions on changing that due to labour shortages. In countries where they can work, people's insecure status often pushes them towards informal job market, where they can be subject to exploitation and coercive and abusive treatment. So these practices are enabled by what Nicholas the Genova called deportability so the possibility of deportation that creates according to the Genova, a revolving door in the labour market which generates a cheap and easily replaceable source for whom exploitative labour is often the only available option. Then a growing body of work has also pointed to the, to the economies that are emerging around borders migration control, but also asylum and refugee protection. For example, a lot has been written on immigration detention facilities in the UK context Katie Bales and Lucy Maebling have shown that people who are detained in these facilities undertake activities that are actually crucial to the running of the centres like cleaning, cooking, gardening, decorating for as little as one pound for per hour. And in the US, Conlon and Hamster have shown how immigrants who are detained in these facilities are at the same time captive consumers and forced labourers because in addition to participating to more or less voluntary work, they have been stripped of their belongings and they're essentially forced to purchase basic goods and services from the same facilities that exploit them. And the situation is also another recurrent theme in this literature. The situation is as long being a technique for political exclusion, a pillar of the hostile environment but authors have also pointed out that it produces value by making asylum seekers dependent on state agency and non governmental organisations for their survival and I know that Martina and Laura Martin are also doing some some interesting work linked to this but looking at extraction through destitution and different modes of data, labour and rent extraction in the context of refugee humanitarianism. So these are some examples of the literature there's quite a vast body of work, but less attention has been paid to the injunctions to work that are inherent within the very process of seeking asylum. So here we're looking at asylum as worker and we are drawing on the work of anthropologist Tina Shrestha who who carried out ethnographic research with Nepali asylum seekers in the US and argued that the multiple activities that are involved in putting together documents she focused especially in witness preparation are similar to work and are also perceived by by people as work in fact her her respondents talked about the work of making paper. So Shrestha conceptualised asylum seeking as both a field of work and an element of participation in precarious labour. So she says that people's participation in precarious labour when we're not directly related to asylum seeking is however sustained by the demands of the intangible labour and the indefinite time invested into the process. So similarly to Shrestha we also approach asylum seeking as a field of work, but rather than looking at how it embodies and perpetuates ontological and socioeconomic precarity. We zoom into the work itself and more specifically the work of collecting, assembling and ordering different forms of data to put together a credible asylum application. So we talk about the invisible work of data in the in the asylum process. And we talk about work rather than labour here because we consider labour as something that produces value to be allowed to narrow definition for what for what we're describing. And of course the the concept of invisible work has has its roots in feminist writings on the unpaid and unrecognised work performed by women in the private sphere. So this was originally the work of authors like Alan Kaplan Daniels, Ali Rushal Hoshield and Dorothy Smith, which critiqued this commonplace understanding of work as something that that we get paid for. If you get paid for something you're automatically doing work but if you don't it doesn't matter how much skills and time and effort you put into it is often not considered work. So these writings challenged this idea and focused in particular on feminised reproductive labour at the beginning but with time scholars also expanded the term invisible work to encompass a wide range of reproductive and non reproductive unpaid and underpaid activities performed by by women but but not only so examples of non feminised activities are like the labour that the work that patients performing managing health records. So this, it can, there's an emphasis here on on effort, time resources and also emotions. And SDS and media communications scholars have also adopted this notion of work in in relation to data. So for example, Jerome Denis has talked about the invisible work of data to challenge this idea of data something that can seamlessly flow from one place to another. The understanding of invisible work is similar to the one adopted by SDS and media communication scholars. But as I said earlier, we are also encompassing analog traces such as documents and certificates and reports. So we saw all this is data. Now to go back to the to the empirical side of things this is an excerpt from one of the two cases that I introduced at the beginning the case of the Pakistani asylum seeker who attached a lot of data and documentation to his his application and the literature on migration has shown that documents well they've talked about documents as concrete distillations of state powers a Horton said that through documents. The state strives to identify and enumerate its population and separated by legal status. But if we if we look at this other archive of power at the at the archive of asylum appears. Data is not the state that strives it's it's asylum seekers, and they they strive to access collect assemble and order different forms of analog and digital data. So just to clarify both in Italy and in the UK will in the EU, in general asylum seekers are responsible for providing evidence in support of their application and proving that they're eligible for protection. And if they don't have identity documents that the range of information that is required can be quite large. So asylum seekers are are expected to turn as much as possible into into their lives into data and immigration lawyers that have compared this to to the making of a cake because like a cake you know collecting evidence it takes the careful selection and assemblage of material and this in turn requires resources effort and time and sometimes skills. And the amount of evidence attached to to end application the one that we see on the screen to his appeal kind of gives us an idea of this. I interviewed his lawyer who explained that the process of retrieving all of the documents for for his case to several months, and actually the hearing itself took 10 hours, which is exceptional. And, however, she also she also pointed out that the collection of these documents of all this evidence that was was made possible by the level of education of this person and also and especially the financial means of this person so she really emphasized that and was someone who what he was a shop owner he had two shops in his country. He had money to be able to retrieve certain certain data and also he, he had connections with people from the political party he was active in outside of Pakistan. So this interview exit really points to how dimensions also like the country of origin class and education levels affect people's ability to even perform the invisible labor that the invisible work that we're talking about. And how the requirements of the asylum process often penalize the most vulnerable groups. So in the interview, the lawyer also pointed out that there are also significant risks in trying to will retrieve some of this material from the country of destination both for asylum seekers and their families if they're helping, and also especially leaving with this kind of information because paradoxically people find themselves in a situation where in order to prove that they are facing persecution. And to provide some of the same documents that that they had to that would incriminate them in the country of origin that they had to discard like a lot of times we've seen popping up. Well, even in this case in the end case. Before the appeal at the territorial commission he was dismissed because he didn't have an arrest warrant. The process of assembling and collecting evidence involves invisible and at times also also dangerous work, but it is work that asylum seekers are expected to perform. So we've seen in many of these cases that judges have made comments on the lack of evidence or insufficient evidence or the fact that the data provided or the documents provided hadn't been contextualized. So we have a certificate here where does it come from. So there is, you know, this this expectations that you should also translate what what you're providing in a way that is intelligible and understandable to decision makers. So this is the part of documentation and another aspect that we found quite quite interesting is that in addition to documentation this invisible work increasingly extends to to the digital sphere. Additionally, in the UK, digital tools are increasingly used by asylum seekers themselves to collect and circulate documents and data, and also to to evidence some of their activities. So, many cases people rely on on Facebook, or what's up I can Facebook you can show photographs it's easier to store it and not to lose it. Social media evidence and digital evidence when presented by asylum seekers is often deemed insufficient or not credible the assumption that being that it is simply erasable. So the quote on the screen is from another case where the judge said that the appellant can delay any potentially damaging Facebook account before returning to Iran, and can truthfully confirm if interrogated on return that he has no interest in separatist politics. The appellant would present as nothing more than a Kurdish male with no political profile and as such is not a real risk on return. I don't know where the grammar mistakes were in the original. So, digital traces on on social media are seen as as erasable and of course this is incorrect, because while a Facebook account can can be deleted interactions on social media transactional so a deleted account doesn't delete the traces of actions. This tendency to dismiss digital tools when when used by migrants we thought it was quite interesting if contrasted to the perceived reliability of digital tools when used by by decision makers to verify aspects of the asylum application. So in M's case before we saw how he was asked to identify 11 different locations on on Google Maps and this is not uncommon Google Maps is used to carry out real time online searches to corroborate like names locations that are mentioned in asylum seekers testimony. And it is seen as a useful tool by by decision makers and some of the lawyers as we spoke with said that especially in the past and of hearings were similar to tours around the village where people were asked to describe roots and name roads local landmarks and so on. However, I mean, even as this lawyer points out and some of the areas that are of interest for these hearings are not really present in Google Maps or other online tools. So there are some blank areas or the, there's very outdated data information on on there and you know this this can make using something like Google Maps which may seem banal quite quite different difficult and to add to that in the most maps, especially those used in by by judges because obviously they're not going to put the one in Arabic there but they they are written in the Latin script with only some names in Arabic, which also may not be obviously the language of people and there's another point to make is that some people speak very local languages that are not even present on online tools I was speaking to an asylum seeker last week who told me that she was actually struggling because nothing online is in in her native language. Um, so yeah this this answer something that seems easy can become quite quite complicated and well also it's like muscle massimiliano spotty. Especially in relation to two languages have done some some really interesting work on on language and the importance of naming things right. So spotty showed that in asylum hearings, the factual knowledge that that decision makers are often looking for may not be there because of language issues or because of discrepancies in naming practices so the names that that you may find online when you you do some research may not be the same ones that people grew up with. So this, this shows that in addition to to collecting and assembling data asylum seeker also expected to will acquire some some skills and knowledge necessary to, to provide certain information or translate that information so that it is accessible to two courts. So we can also take time and again, the second quote in the screen that the lawyer talked about having worked with clients sometimes up to 15 hours to collect information but also using using Google Maps and ideally you start preparing for an advance. So this is the last section of the paper so I'm going to go through it quite quickly but because I'm conscious about timing because it's very much a work in progress. I also started thinking about you know the temporalities of invisible work and and the strikingly long periods of time that elapsed from like between the lodging of the application and the decision. There was a recent report by the refugee council, which showed that at the end of March 2021 there were 66,185 people waiting for an initial decision, three quarters of which have been waiting for over six months. And the backlog of cases in the UK this has increased almost tenfold since 2010. And this is of course just the initial state stage and then you have the appeals and asylum seekers have reported waiting times as long as eight but also up to 15 years and this is reflected in some of the cases that we looked at we started really tracing how much time it took and sometimes it is quite striking. So the refugee council report describes this time as a cruel wait and asylum seekers themselves have talked about how painful this waiting is. And of course there have been scholars who have described this process of waiting as an existential limbo or liminal space marked by insecurity and immobility. And these are all very important contributions but what we also think is important is to specify that people are not just passively waiting for a decision to be make to be made. While they're waiting they gather evidence, they have to go to doctors appointments to document certain aspects of their narrative, they have their applications rejected, they gather new evidence, we call witnesses and so on. So the asylum process involves sustained invisible work and another interesting fact about temporality actually have probably to develop this is that they have to collect data about their past but also to continue documenting themselves in a way with like that they have to place activities like political political activities outside their country of origin so pertaining to the present, or in Italy for example in order to get humanitarian or now special protection, you should show some level of of integration and therefore like you need to prove activities such as volunteering or that you're working and so on. Yeah, it's, we thought this this was also quite an interesting aspect. I'm running out of time so just to wrap up very very quickly. So our main point is that asylum seeking entails work and this is extensive and and continual invisible work and we think that that attending to these forms of invisible work is is crucial to understanding all the challenges of asylum seeking beyond just you know the the the migratory journey also in the in the country of destination. And it's also important to to counter some problematic depictions of asylum seekers as passive subjects who are just waiting for for a decision to be made and also the basis discourses to get attached to that. Of course waiting is an important aspect, but there's there's more than than that and you know when when these activities are performed by by lawyers or by judges they're seen as as work. So we we think it's important to kind of change this this understandable challenge, the separation of where work what work is and and who performs it. And finally the concept conceptualization of invisible work raises important what political questions about about the equipment and resources. Others have or actually don't have at the at their disposal to undertake this work. And this has political implications for for how we understand the resources responsibilities and also the resistance to the making of precarious subjects. And this is it. Thank you very much. Hopefully I'm not too out of time. Okay. So thank you. Thank you so much. Look at him for the presentation and I also had the pleasure to read the draft of the paper in advance. And so and for me is a super interesting in contribution to a literature on on asylum precisely for this angle on work work and time that as you're saying the paper remain under theorized in migration literature at least mean this this combination of like analysis on time and labor. And actually, while you were speaking, I mean I have, I have three points but whatever speaking what came to my mind is that in most of migration literature that is a lot of like, many analysis about migrants and asylum seekers being turned into exploitable labor force. So the fact that they are put to work, but there is much less about how this process that you describe steel their time as potential workers so that basically delay their entrance in the, in the potential like labor market in Europe and this is something that from a different perspective, family scholar just beer poor. I mean, develop in a quite nice way speaking about engaging with the concept of slow that and saying okay very much a lot of attention has been paid to the concept of that but what about the slow they mentioned and what happens while people are delayed. And as you described, they are not just waiting. They are not just in a limbo as many scholars describe but they are forced to do a lot of activities that are necessary for them to to to obtain me to to get their main goal. So I have three points. And of course, feel free not to address all of them. The first point that I would like to raise is about your multiple so throughout the paper and also the presentation you speak about work and also work and labor even if now you have clarified it. You prefer the use of like the term work. You're considering different aspect. So, for instance, in the paper you also refer to cognitive labor, and then there is this expression the work of data that you illustrating the presentation, and then there is the work of bringing also these logical evidence. So I was wondering, well, if you're what are you meant from a theoretical methodological point of view, what are you trying to do in the paper by bringing together this concept of work that remain also mean that usually are analyzed in a in a separate or distinct way in the literature. So for instance, what do we gain from labeling or these different activities of cognitive labor and the work of data. I understand that there is this like building on anthropology literature on what is labor in terms of activities but there are multiple aspects of labor that he described so I was curious if you're, I mean, if maybe you're planning to develop also a theoretical section about what are you doing by bringing together these heterogeneous aspect of labor. And, and the second point is about the historical dimension temporal dimension. So I was wondering you point to the fact that more and more now there is a need for asylum seekers to prove evidence through technology and using like their social media and so on. So there is definitely this shift so additional digital data alongside analogical evidence and I was wondering if you mean where do you situate right is increase in the paper you mentioned is increasingly me where you could find in this archive that there has been this escalation but also you you situate in part your paper in the literature about the culture of suspicion of asylum seeker and and saying well there is this but there is also this other aspect which is not only about the narrative but also about bringing the evidence. And so I was wondering if in your view there has been so if you as if you say this in like as part of a historical transformation over the last decades or so, or if you just want to highlight this dimension that in your opinion has been under theorize of like the materiality of like data also analogical data with respect to the dimension of the narrative. And, and for instance, I'm thinking about Roberto Beneduccio instead focus more on the other aspect of like narrative, but also points to the fact that sometimes even if they bring more material evidence this is not unfortunately enough so that every the evidence of data and logical data is not, is not enough for countering the mistrust towards the asylum seeker. And, and the third point is about is a question about because you engage more with like STS literature on work and then anthropology literature. And so I was wondering, because for me that the most immediate automatic like a direction for discussing this is also feminist literature on unpaid labor, and I was wondering what does the category of work does in your analysis from a political point of view so while for feminist literature on unpaid labor the point is to highlight also the most of invisible exploitation that are at stake, and in some cases also to to mean to situate these in claims for remuneration, or even if this is not the only, I mean this is just one of the steps. And I was wondering, even if you don't conflate me, you distinguishes and for us work is not only related is not necessarily related to value production and exploitation but I was wondering what, what is, I mean, let's say, the political stake of visibilizing labor. Should I address these points first or I think for efficiency, let's have Sasuke go and then you can just you know, it's a great yes, such as low note to take it but yes, but you also choose what you want to respond to you to right I don't know if we have time to respond to all of them but yeah certainly some really great feedback so yeah Sasuke on to you. Well, thanks. It's going to go very neatly from what Martina has just said. Thank you for the paper and the great presentation and when Amanda asked me to join as a discuss and I jumped at the opportunity because I'm really intrigued by the idea of bringing the concept of work and or labor to the processes of and practices of asylum. And for me this combines two things that I'm also interested in and one is a more long term interest in feminist global political economy, and how it contributes to understanding different security regimes and practices I'm also thinking here about Amanda's work in on security as labor, and specifically her work on the invisible labor that goes into enabling migration for security work which is a slightly different angle but I think speaks to many of those themes, and so I'm just going to use these two minutes to probably highlight a few of the contributions that such an approach feminist global political economy can make to the study on the interrelations between migration and invisible labor, and then particular probably to carve out a little bit more the broader societal structures and relations of power, in which your specific empirical phenomenon is embedded and then link this to to another interest of mine in you borders and how gender and race and form our findings of deserving this and riskiness and so on and so forth. So I'm thinking, you know feminist global political economy makes two theoretical maneuvers that are interesting and one is, is that you already mentioned this that they propose a much broader definition of work that includes reproductive emotional and so on. But they always ask, as well, you know how is this sort of labor invisibilized in order to sustain other kinds of labor and the broader structures of capitalism market driven driven logics and the so called productive labor. So this is why I think you might maybe, maybe a neat distinction between labor and work does not work in this context. And then feminists, you know, ask us to, to unpack you know how do the notions of gender and race inform what counts as labor, and what doesn't, and which kind of labor is then as a consequence, invisibilized and you're touching upon that in the paper as well. And I was particularly intrigued when you spoke about, you know, how the work of lawyers, NGO workers, judges, you authorities is seen as work, but then others not. So this made me think you know what kinds of understandings of masculinity femininity and also whiteness going to these judgments, and isn't the whole procedure that you're describing sort of an exercise in how to approximate an imagination of a white middle class handling of one's own data, and everyone who cannot live up to these standards is then somehow feminized and racialized. And that's why it's becoming so easy to invisibilize this kind of work. And I think from approaching it from this broader angle can help us get out of this individualized understanding of what is going on there and embed more broadly in the political economy of migration you spoke about this you know the migration industries and so on but also the the regular labor markets that asylum seekers then can enter or also the informal labor markets that they do enter. So I think this might help you know talk about the relationship between these precarious migrants on labor markets and the invisible labor that goes into the asylum claim itself. You can draw on these different literatures but also ask how do these different phenomena interact with each other. Also, I mean there's lots of stuff in nowadays about bordering as labor and the laborious process and what kinds of activities are being seen and which not. So I think just by exploring by what kind of work is being seen, you can say a lot about what is invisibilized and why. We can connect more broadly to these issues of how our borders, governed in the modern world. So to answer also sort of the question Martina had you know what does the notion of work, what additional layers does this reveal about the whole process what are we seeing when we're addressing this is work and not waiting or something else. And also what makes the work for asylum different from the work that goes into other kinds of migration. For example visa applications for labor migration extremely laborious and also depends on a community depends on family members so that there's broader networks that are also gendered that that are probably interested is interesting here. I have more but I'm just going to leave it at that and see if there's, if you want to respond and if there's more from the audience. Thank you anyways it was really inspiring. So first of all, thank you so much for all this great feedback and these, and these comments that they're really, they're really useful and and some of them also reflect conversations that that Claudia and I have have been having and for a lot of this distinction between labor and work I mean it started I'm going to address them kind of like group some together some of the points of Martin and some of the points of Saskia and then I will probably forget something but feel free to to remind me. So we started and in fact the initial title was about labor but then we we judge that kind of this idea of labor as as value production didn't as the production of value did a quite capture what what we wanted to say so we took a more. This is like an everyday understanding of of work and what what is perceived as as work, but we're also afraid we're also aware that then there is the first of all the risk of, you know, stretching that the concept too much so what doesn't counter work and this is why we borrow from feminist scholars that emphasised the role of of effort, time and resources, and actually something that well the literature also emphasise emotions and that's something perhaps that that we should explore a little bit more because a lot goes into into, you know, assembling and balancing all of these traces, these traces together. So, we, we very much kind of followed Dorothy Smith advocating for a more generous notion of work, but something that, you know, still maintains that traditional understanding of something that requires resources and time but also that is kind of a man meshed in relations and organisations and also forms of forms of power, and that it shapes the way that people relate to to others in invisible in invisible ways, and I think, you know, you are right in saying, well that we talk about the different different firms of forms of work here and in terms of what we gain from from labelling it, it's probably something that that that we should that we should reflect on and I also agree that there isn't a clear distinction perhaps between that work and labour as as Aska said because keeping this people outside of work again as as Martina highlighted I mean it delays the the entering into this, you know, in into into work, but at the same time it contributes to that precarity, right and maybe pushing people towards even more more informal and risky jobs so definitely a good point that that we should we should elaborate on and I think this in terms of what the political what the political implications of this are. I think it links very well to what to what Sasuke said so Martina's question and Sasuke's question kind of linked in a way that it's important to draw attention to how the construction of what counts as work. It depends on, well, legal structures but also in the intersection of factors like race, gender, and, and, and other dimensions that they mentioned so whose whose work doesn't doesn't go recognized so all of these factors shape how we defined work and also whose work is is invisibilized right so I think that drawing attention to that can then draw draw attention to hold those, those wider issues that that that we've been, we've been talking about that Sasuke has has been highlighting. And I think it is also important to think about resources right and who has the resources the fact that lawyers and judges when they do this work it is, it is work, but asylum seekers are sometimes asked to do very similar things, but with little to resources, and even you know things like going to hearings in a couple of the, of the appeal cases that we've read, I mean people weren't able or like what they, they weren't able to show up because they didn't have the money to pay for the fare so it's this, you know, it's a cycle that reinforces itself and thinking about work and the resources that are needed for work is is also an important, an important political implications of this, and also again linking to to another point of what Sasuke says so kind of the link with with with security. In a way, thinking about the work like the reproduction I guess so for of bordering systems and who does the work that that reproduces it also you know, beyond the just the travel and the border but yes so I think this is another point that that that we that we highlight and that is important. But I'm trying to tell you that I'm very slow at writing notes. So now it's almost impossible to understand, but the, the historical dimension. So the shift. I have to say that kind of the, the, the increase of, of digital data is mostly like used by asylum seekers themselves in in more recent years so in more recent appeals to to collect and and store the, the documents or photographs of digital data. And it's when it's mostly in the UK so I haven't found found quite as much in the Italian archive but it's also because it's very it's much more difficult to navigate the Italian archive like the British one is the UK. One is quite neat and it's up there on the internet but as Martina probably knows in Italy, things are a little bit more difficult but speaking with with immigration lawyers as well they said that they haven't found quite the same news. But what they did point out though is kind of this transition to the digital digital in court so so some asylum seekers will the lawyers I spoke they say that they would like to see more digital photographs or more digital videos, for example, used in the cases because they would be very useful, but there's also an issue with the system and what you can file digitally so some of the systems used by courts don't recognize the certain types of files and therefore they can show them in court. But they can't you know keep them in the records, and I think that's there's also quite quite an interesting aspect so these digital traces, first of all, in some cases they're dismissed, they're seen as something that can be deleted in the case of Facebook posts. And also, when shown in courts when you're showing quotes things like videos or photos and sometimes it doesn't then stay in the file is the one off. So in terms of the culture of suspicion. You are absolutely right. A lot has been written about about the narrative, and, well, Bomer and Schumann wrote wrote a recently a very, very interesting book where they also talked about the increasing importance of documents and documentation and improves but you're right because. There's a lot of documents but if there is an inconsistency in the narrative, then that still takes precedence. It doesn't matter how much you provide. So I think that that again shows how the system is geared against against asylum seekers it all fits with the culture of suspicion but also the hostile environment and the wanting to, to, to keep, to keep people, how right making it more and more difficult for people to be granted granted asylum and again another dimension that that we should we should emphasize perhaps the focus on the honor on data kind of misses out all this other dimension of credibility the credibility of the narrative. Yeah, thank you very much. I haven't probably missed something. Sorry. Well there's lots to engage further in so thank you both Martin and Saskia for those really important discussion points. I just have someone in the chat box. Iliara Ferrari Ferrari. I'm sorry this is my anglophone tongue. Anyway, she said thank you la Cretza for an interesting presentation. I work with survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking in London. Many of our service users are also asylum seekers I found it really interesting how you talked about the fact that asylum seekers might be forced to work while they wait for a decision on their claims, often in illegal or irregular ways. When I think of my clients. I think the issue poses a huge risk risk as claimants might end up being re trafficked or re exploited again. While in reality asylum seekers should be safe once they reach the so called safe country in fact they're they rarely are being destitute with no right to work poses in fact a big threat where exploitation and modern slavery become possibilities. It's not realistic to expect asylum seekers to wait years sometimes two to three for a decision and just live on subsistence paid to them by governments and charities. So I guess that's more of a statement validation statement than anything an important one though. Yeah. Yeah, thank you thank you very much I think that that is very important you know also this this notion of safety and how that's almost never an element. Not when it comes to asylum seekers in the UK but also outside and the whole asylum process itself can be quite retraumatizing. And as you said, in the inability to work can push people towards towards these the situations and the amount of money that they get from the government is around 36 or 40 pounds per week is is not enough and also people who are put in certain accommodations I mean they're not always. Even if you get a meal like a lot of people were talking about how you know that they don't get fruit or other things that that they may some basic needs and you know it's there's a true risk. And the NGO is actually doing some some great advocacy work about. So if you want to follow some of the other organizations I'd be happy to give you some some links if you want to get in touch. That's great I think I have a I'm going to abuse my position of chair I have a question to what we have a few minutes left. I, I personally in my work side on the concept of labor I use labor overwork. And I mean there's a Kathy weeks wrote a great book on the politics of work and why she used work over labor to so I guess you know this is this is everyone's own decision but I just wonder I haven't read your paper but I wonder for the audience to who hasn't read it. What would you say is the key contribution you want to make in this paper like what do you want people to take away what's the key argument that is that's probably not a fair question. But in working through this paper I guess what, maybe not the key contribution what I guess when you're working through this paper what are the things that are most striking or most important for you that you want to disseminate to larger audience. I think some of the main points that that we discussed so kind of challenging a certain image of the of the passive passive asylum seeker is is quite important. And also thinking about, again as I said earlier how we understand work changes depending on who performs work right and how those, those categories like like race class gender player role in that in that definition and I think that the point that that saskia may made on how you know this masculine masculinity, whiteness, and, and all of these factors kind of shape that that commonplace understanding of work which leads to dismiss a series of other, other actions that they do have that do have implications and they do take effort and time and have also implications on on people's lives. Right and I think an important point of this actually this came from from some of the interviews because we were, we're looking at the invisible work and that's, you know, our main, our main point but also thinking about who gets to perform to even perform this this work, what the expectations are there and what does this mean for a fair asylum process.