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The Carceral Airport
Managing Race as Risk through Biometric Systems and Technologies
- Source: Public, Volume 30, Issue 60, Mar 2020, p. 76 - 91
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- 01 Mar 2020
Abstract
This paper considers the site of the modern airport as a space of biopower that facilitates and manages risk by subjecting Muslim travelers to more intense levels of scrutiny than others. I consider Canadian airports, in particular, as spaces that not only facilitate and perpetuate the production of racialized knowledges and practices of racial profiling against Canadian Muslims, but, moreover, as race-based, spatial enclosures that produce what I refer to as the ‘anxiety of stuckedness.’ Despite the rapid evolution of automated and biometric systems, which are now found in many airports across the globe, and are often touted as race-neutral technologies (Bigo 2006), I argue that the airport’s security and surveillance infrastructure attempt to conceal old and new logics of colonialism and governmentality within the invisibility of transnational databases, data flows and, increasingly, biometric systems.