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School of Politics and International Relations

Dr Keren Weitzberg, MA & PhD, Stanford University

Keren

Senior Lecturer and Fellow at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences

Email: k.weitzberg@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne 2.13
Twitter: @KerenWeitzberg
Office Hours: Wednesdays 10:30-11:30 (in office or online) and Fridays 10:30-11:30 (online). Please book using the link below.

Profile

Keren Weitzberg joined the School of Politics and International Relations in September 2022 as a senior lecturer and fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Working at the intersection of science and technology studies, migration and border studies, and critical race studies, she examines problematics related to mobility, biometrics, and fintech. She has over 15 years of experience carrying out archival research, fieldwork, and interviews in Kenya.

Keren’s interest in the intersections between migration and digital identity evolved out of research for her first book, We Do Not Have Borders, which traces how and why Somali populations came to be historically perceived as ‘foreign’ to the Kenyan nation-state. We Do Not Have Borders was a finalist for the 2018 African Studies Association Book Prize for best scholarly work on Africa. Keren is now working on a new book project, tentatively entitled Biometrics from the Margins, which weaves together archival research and fieldwork from her time spent with undocumented and under-documented people in Nairobi and Garissa. Using Kenya as a case study, the project examines why the ‘unidentified’ have become an object of global concern and care in recent decades. It also looks at Kenya’s fraught history with fingerprinting, which was first introduced by British colonial authorities in the early twentieth century. The project asks: How are those at the physical and metaphorical margins of the nation (including migrants, nomadic populations, refugees, and border communities), who have historically struggled to access identification documents, navigating the new world of digital identity?

Keren is also interested in the relationship between biometric systems, climactic crisis, and scarcity. Both proponents and critics of ‘green growth’ have tended to focus on technologies intended to replace fossil fuels, overlooking those aimed at rationing and managing its diminishing returns and supplies. Studying technologies like biometrics—which mediate people’s access to resources, services, and freedoms likely to become scarcer and more unequally distributed in the coming decades—allows us to think critically about the risks, possibilities, and pressing challenges of post-growth and post-carbon economies. This includes the future of migration and the politics of social welfare, rationing, and redistribution in an age of resource depletion and ecological and environmental breakdown.

In 2023, alongside a wider research team, Keren will be embarking on a new project: ‘Is identity innovation inclusive? Making digital wallets work for people on the move and wider society’, funded by The Robert Bosch Foundation. As governments around the world step up to regulate artificial intelligence and biometrics, digital wallets aim to disrupt digital identity systems. Designed to help people store, manage, and exchange money and identity credentials electronically, digital wallets are thought to give users more control over their data, including in cross-border contexts, and correct historic power imbalances. But do they? This project aims to assess the inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions of digital wallets and produce a set of policy and design recommendations to ensure that the development of wallets supports migrants’ needs. At this critical juncture for identity and border management, there is an urgent need to ensure policy and technology decisions are informed by the needs, experiences, and perspectives of forced and voluntary migrants.

In recent years, Keren has applied insights gleaned from her time in East Africa to broader global questions. Keren has worked on projects for civil society organisations like Amnesty International, Privacy International, and Campaign Against the Arms Trade that have explored the rights of refugees in the digital age, the growing use of digital technologies for border and immigration enforcement, and the use of biometrics in the humanitarian/aid sector and counterterrorism industry. She has also worked on a moving-image piece with filmmaker Edwin Mingard, funded by UCL Culture and Arts Council England, which explores the UK hostile environment. Her research has appeared in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Quartz Africa, and BBC World Service. She is also book reviews editor for the journal Africa, one of the premier journals devoted to the study of African societies and culture. 

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