[Air-L] Conference “Un/Making Boundaries: Seams, Borders, and Fences in Sensor Media Environments”, 16-17 April, Uni Siegen (DE)

Fri Mar 27 00:30:45 PDT 2026

Dear colleagues,

The CRC Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (Germany) is happy to invite you to the “Un/Making Boundaries” Conference on 16 and 17 April 2026!

This conference taking place on location in the city centre of Siegen (exact location will be communicated upon registration) will feature interdisciplinary discussions of the role of seams, borders and fences in the contemporary sensor media environments that ubiquitously permeate urban and rural spaces as well as borderlands without being necessarily visible or directly accessible for academic inquiry or public scrutiny.

Please find a short version of the conference abstract below and the complete abstract, including an overview of the conference program in attached PDF.

Conference “Un/Making Boundaries:

Seams, Borders, and Fences in Sensor Media Environments”

Dates: 16 - 17 April 2026

Location: University of Siegen (on location)

Registration: https://my.liberaforms.org/registration-unmaking-boundaries

Digital media are marked by particular ambivalences towards bordering and the un/making of all kinds of boundaries. To function as seamlessly as possible, such media depend on the interoperability of various hardware and software components, devices and apps as well as on the expectations and practices of those who shape and operate them. Today’s sensor societies’ (cf. Andrejevic and Burdon 2015) promise of ‘seamless interoperability’ drives the growing implementation of so-called ‘smart’, networked computational infrastructures in urban and rural environments, for the governance of public spaces and to establish and uphold border regimes, in order to sense, capture and control human and non-human entities. Such ‘smart’ computational infrastructures thrive on and bring about increasingly unbounded - or “frameless” (Andrejevic 2018) - modes of data collection.

This conference aims at bringing three sites where boundaries are made, un- and re-made into a fruitful dialogue, inquiring into (deep) bordering as cooperative practice and the (re)configuration of seamlessness as an ongoing achievement:

  1.  In the southern EU borderlands, asymmetric seamless data collection translates into violent regimes of migration control, into practices of sensing and counter-sensing those regimes, and into attempts to cross material and digital borders.
  2.  On ‘smart’ farms, the virtualisation of pasture fencing creates zones in which containment or exclusion is negotiated between more-than-human actors, that is, between livestock and the various devices used for tracking, monitoring and, ultimately, restricting their movement via operant conditioning.
  3.  In urban spaces, “smart city” discourses and their innovation agenda’s promise to optimise the management of public spaces through platform technologies and networked digital devices offering “seamless” interaction and interoperability, while everyday practices of governing and navigating urban areas reveal their socio-technical “seams” opening up opportunities for situational forms of critical engagement.

The conference features both contributions that engage with these sites and contributions that offer a theoretical meta-perspective on seams, borders, frames and their respective absences.

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All the best

Daniela van Geenen | PhD Candidate | Project A03 “Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces” |
CRC Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen

Special issue “Critical Technical Practice(s) in Digital Research” (Convergence): https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/cona/30/1

Geenen, D. van, Es, K. van, & Gray, J. W. (2023). Pluralising critical technical practice. Convergence. Special Issue “Critical Technical Practice(s) in Digital Research”, 13548565231192105. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231192105

Chao, J., Geenen, D. van, Gerlitz, C., & Vlist, F. N. van der (2024). Digital methods for sensory media research: Toolmaking as a critical technical practice. Convergence. Special Issue “Critical Technical Practice(s) in Digital Research”, 30(1), 236–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241226791

Burkhardt, M., Geenen, D. van, Gerlitz, C., Hind, S., Kaerlein, T., Lämmerhirt, D., & Volmar, A. (Eds.). (2022). Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data. transcript. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5561-2/interrogating-datafication/?number=978-3-8394-5561-6

See also: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1346-3253
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