Digital Culture & Society (DCS)

Rethinking boundaries in the age of datafication: concepts, practices, infrastructures, and their social dynamics.

Concepts of boundaries have shaped research and analysis across the social sciences, particularly in Science and Technology Studies (STS), media studies, and organization studies. The recent turn to datafication the growing pervasiveness of data-driven methods, computational infrastructures, and data analysis across diverse social areas is also fundamentally concerned with boundaries: datafication is centrally implicated in the dissolution, perpetuation, and installation of diverse material and discursive boundaries. Despite this, research explicitly addressing boundaries in datafication, and employing different boundary concepts, remains limited.The contributions aim to advance systematic exploration of boundaries and boundary concepts in the context of datafication. They investigate the potential and limitations of analytical concepts such as boundary objects, boundary work, boundary infrastructures, and related terms, as well as boundaries more broadly. The special issue will include empirical analyses, conceptual reflections, and methodological explorations on the interplay between datafication and boundary dynamics.

Autorentext
Ramón Reichert (Dr.) ist Senior Researcher am Department für Kulturwissenschaft der Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Wien.Sagal Hussein is a researcher in the field of international political economy and political ecology, with a particular focus on the histories of state violence and racism.Mathias Fuchs (Dr.) ist ein Künstler und Medienwissenschaftler. Er war u.a. Senior Lecturer an der University of Salford in Greater Manchester, Vertretungsprofessor an der Universität Potsdam und Senior Fellow am Institute of Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS). Fuchs arbeitet am Institut für Kultur und Ästhetik Digitaler Medien an der Leuphana-Universität Lüneburg. Fuchs hat im Feld der künstlerischen Auseinandersetzung mit Computerspielen und deren Theorie Pionierarbeit geleistet und leitet ein DFG-gefördertes Projekt zu Gamification (2018-2021).Ramón Reichert (Dr.) ist Senior Researcher am Department für Kulturwissenschaft der Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Wien.Anna Näslund (vm. Dahlgren), (Prof.), lehrt Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Stockholm.

Zusammenfassung
In migration enforcement regimes across the Global North, AI-driven systems are increasingly institutionalized as technical-media infrastructures. Cases like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the U.S. exemplify the convergence of large-scale policing with advanced forms of automated data processing, machine learning, generative AI, and the strategic deployment of commercially sourced datasets. This issue examines the entanglement of artificial intelligence, surveillance infrastructures, and contemporary policing, bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from critical AI studies, digital literacy, media archaeology, and political science. The contributors interrogate how algorithmic systems reconfigure the scale, scope, and operative logics of state power and conceptualize AI not merely as a tool of governance but as a constitutive element in the transformation of governmental rationalities, since AI-based policing systems are frequently trained on historically biased datasets, reproducing and intensifying racialized forms of discrimination and structural inequality. Hence, a central concern of the volume is the potential for critical interventions and media-political initiatives, exploring how practices such as counter-mapping and critical data activism might challenge or reconfigure these infrastructures of control.