How did you come to study the link between migration and technology?
During the so-called European “migration crisis” of 2015–2016, and the subsequent border closure, I became involved in grassroots initiatives that aimed to provide support to people on the move who attempted to seek asylum. Through this engagement, I witnessed how digital technologies were being used in the context of an increasingly closed migration regime. What struck me early on was the gap between these lived realities and the dominant narratives by NGO, journalistic and even academic accounts, which often framed digital technologies as “empowering” or even as “solutions” for migrants.
While it is true that GPS-enabled smartphones, messaging platforms, and online forums provide important support to people on the move, their role cannot be properly understood without acknowledging the legal precarity and structural violence that people face. I noticed a disconnect between portrayals of these tools as neutral or liberatory and the actual ways they were embedded in contexts of closed borders, criminalisation, and securitised migration regimes. In such settings, technology becomes entangled with older and emergent practices of containment. Digital tools can offer leverage and support, but they are also implicated in the extension of control and surveillance.
Another frustration I had with the existing literature was the lack of attention to the specific sociocultural practices of media users. This oversight reflected a broader issue within mainstream migration studies: the tendency to homogenise “migrants” as a single, undifferentiated category. Before my PhD, I conducted ethnographic research among Afghans in Iran as part of my master’s programme in anthropology at the University of Oxford (2018–2019). While my focus was on access to higher education, many of my interlocutors spoke of mobility of relatives moving toward Europe via Turkey and Greece. Through their stories, I began to grasp the perils and forms of collaboration that shaped these journeys. I stayed in touch with key interlocutors and later met others in Greece and in the Balkans, and their experiences deepened my understanding of how technologies were being used within existing networks of solidarity — within but also largely beyond national and ethnolinguistic affiliations — to face landscape marked by border closures and migration criminalisation.
When I joined the Anthropology and Sociology PhD programme at the Geneva Graduate Institute, I focused my research on Afghan mobility in Southeastern Europe and the infrastructure of mobility. As I began my fieldwork in Italy and Bosnia, it quickly became clear that the everyday uses of digital technologies, especially in relation to repeated pushbacks, remained largely understudied. I decided to centre my research on this dimension.
Can you describe your thesis questions?
Due to the lack of legal pathways to international protection and the increasing criminalisation of migration, people who are forced to move often embark on illegalised journeys. Afghans represent an important part of populations pushed on such pathways. Along these routes, states seek to control mobility by rendering it legible — that is, visible and controllable. Here, I draw on James Scott’s concept of “legibility” in Seeing like a State (1998), which describes how modern statecraft relies on the ability to render mobile subjects legible. In my thesis, I show how illegalised people on the move often strive to remain “illegible” to the state, meaning their physical movements must avoid leaving traces that could lead to apprehension or deportation. In reverse, many of them also attempt to make the state legible — i.e. to understand how the state’s means of identification might impact further projects.
From this tension, I formulated my main research questions: How do the everyday digital practices of people at the margins of the state interact with regimes of legibility and illegibility? And how do digital technologies both enhance and constrain the agency of people on the move?
My thesis seeks to move beyond techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic accounts of technology in migration. Instead, I develop a sociotechnical perspective which is one that situates digital practices within broader social, political, and historical contexts. In this view, technologies are never neutral tools: they are always entangled with power, shaped by the unforeseen outcome of the workings of infrastructures.
How did you go about it, methodologically speaking?
My research is grounded in digital and nondigital ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2021 and 2023 across Switzerland, Italy, Bosnia, and Serbia. I focused on the everyday uses of digital technologies by Afghans on the move and people supporting them such as grassroots organisations, lawyers, doctors, shop keepers… My approach was to get involved in networks of solidarity and (in)formal support, on public spaces such as squares, refugee residencies and informal camps. I also joined online groups to remain aware of the online context of information sharing. However, I made sure to analyse all online content by triangulating it with my interlocutors’ interpretation and I always made my work as a researcher transparent. I also observed the way material infrastructure played a role in journeys: how SIM cards, power banks and phone’s hardware were acquired, lost, exchanged, destroyed, repaired.
Hence, I aimed to bridge the so-called “online” and “offline” realms. Ethical considerations were central to my methodology. I developed ongoing feedback loops with participants, ensuring that a variety of perspectives shaped both the research questions and methods and the publication outcomes. Given the sensitivity of the topic, especially in documenting border violence and illegalised mobility, I was careful to avoid exposing individuals to further harm. This led me to explore collaborative knowledge production and multimodal methods, including drawing. These approaches were sometimes experimental, but they allowed for careful reflection on what to publish and how.
What are your major findings?
During my ethnographic fieldwork in Southeastern Europe, I was consistently exposed to the direct and indirect forms of violence experienced by people in borderlands. My interlocutors developed new vocabularies and techniques such as linguistic cues, social bounds, and technological know-how, in response to these conditions. I observed a constantly evolving multilingual lexicon, through which people made sense of their experiences and of the people and tools they relied on. These practices and terms were dynamic, shifting in response to changing border regimes. For instance, I made a genealogy of the “game” metaphor in its Persianised terminology, i.e. the words to speak about migration itself.
My task as an ethnographer was to identify emerging patterns without exposing people. From this concern, I developed the concept of sociotechnical navigation to capture how people on the move engage with digital technologies in their everyday efforts to navigate hostile European migration regimes. This concept emphasises the material and social dimensions of digital practices. How do people form groups around GPS-enabled smartphones to walk long distances with few resources? How do people share knowledge to survive pushbacks? For people moving through Southeastern Europe, as much as for border guards, sociotechnical navigation often involves the production, circulation, and erasure of digital traces, from GPS data and messaging metadata to the destruction or concealment of smartphones and SIM cards. These traces can be both evidence for asylum claims and for pushbacks.
The title of my thesis, Dotted Journeys, refers both to the language of GPS navigation used by my interlocutors, where movement is rendered as a series of points (noqta in Persian) and to the non-linear, interrupted nature of journeys shaped by repeated pushbacks. At each geographical node, data is produced, and efforts are made by various actors to erase or store it, reflecting data politics and a broader struggle over legibility and illegibility when migration journeys are articulated with digital technologies.
Overall, one of the main contributions of my research is to show how digital technologies reshape border violence and how the interactions between digital infrastructures, material landscapes, and state practices generate new forms of exposure and agency, which cannot be fully understood without ethnographic attention to everyday life and perspectives from below.
What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?
During my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to meet many people who generously shared their stories, including their often violent and dehumanising encounters with border regimes. One such person, Samir (an anonymised name), greatly influenced my understanding of how border violence operates and how to write about it. We met at the Serbian-Romanian border in an abandoned factory that served as a squat, where I returned over several months with a grassroots organisation in the early 2020s.
Like many others, Samir relied on a GPS-enabled smartphone to navigate physical terrain and cross borders. Yet, like many others too, he experienced what has become a common and disturbing practice at multiple EU borders: the violent destruction or confiscation of phones during apprehensions. Devices were often searched, damaged, or intentionally broken by border guards before being returned, or not returned at all. These forms of violence, targeting the digital tools on which people depended physically and affectively, were widespread and rarely held to account.
This speaks to a new modality of border violence, one that operates through and against digital infrastructure. While civil society actors and NGOs have long denounced pushbacks and other forms of abuse, there remains a significant level of impunity, particularly when the violence is enacted through seemingly mundane actions like phone searches or data extraction.
Digital practices cannot be understood outside of people’s social and political contexts, and without integrating their own thinking and voices in the knowledge production. For Afghans in legal precarity in EU borderlands, smartphones do not serve the same function as they do for, say, middle-class users in Western urban contexts. Not because media users are fundamentally different, but because these devices are turned into valuable tools in hostile environments, almost vital for survival and navigation. Ultimately, my work contributes to understanding how data circulates within border regimes, and how it participates in reproducing old and new logics of exclusion and also solidarity through novel technological and infrastructural means.
What are you doing now?
I have recently joined the NCCR – on the move (National Center of Competence in Research for migration and mobility studies) at the University of Neuchâtel as a postdoctoral researcher. There, I am part of a project examining liminal experiences and forms of agency among people forcibly displaced from Ukraine and Syria. It is an opportunity to expand and refine the concepts developed in my thesis and explore how digital technologies are used and made sense of by people experiencing displacement in different contexts of legal precarity.
- Listen to a podcast with Dr Khamsy — Since 1 April 2025, asylum seekers’ electronic devices can be searched in Switzerland. In this short audio interview in French, Dr Khamsy points out that the use of phones by migrants is particularly rooted in solidarity and expresses concern about how this new decision may affect their data privacy.
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On 4 November 2024, Nina Khamsy (second from the left) defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology, titled “Dotted Journeys: Digital Technologies and Afghan Migration in European Borderlands”. Professor Jean-François Bayart (not on photo) presided over the committee, which included Professor Alessandro Monsutti (left), Thesis Co-Supervisor, Research Professor Till Mostowlansky (right), Thesis Co-Supervisor, and Associate Professor Zuzanna Olszewska (second from the right), School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK.
(Photo by Tobias Marschall)
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Khamsy, Nina. “Dotted Journeys: Digital Technologies and Afghan Migration in European Borderlands.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Khamsy.
Banner image: photo montage by Nina Khamsy based on her field photos in Serbia, 2022.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.