Contested Counts: Data Practices on the Dead of Migration

Presented by Maurice Stierl (Osnabrück University).

That states do not systematically count, trace or identify the dead and disappeared of migration across border zones has long been noted. Interdisciplinary scholarship has frequently drawn from Judith Butler’s (2004) concept of ‘un/grievability’ to characterise the lack of care and concern when it comes to ‘border deaths’, revealing the deeply racialised differentiation between lives that ‘count’ and those that do not. Given the absence of state accounts, activists, journalists, researchers, non-governmental and later international organisations have sought to reveal the scale of suffering by documenting migrant deaths. In the context of Europe, such ‘counter-statistics’ practices began thirty years ago. Though commonly regarded as important political interventions that fill ‘knowledge gaps’, there are enormous discrepancies in their findings. For example, while the International Organization for Migration documents 1,070 deaths along the migration route to the Canary Islands in 2024, the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras speaks of 9,757 deaths for the same year, same region. What do we make of these conflicting counts? Engaging Sciences and Technologies Studies perspectives and Ignorance Studies literature, this paper explores the contestedness of statistics on migrant deaths and their performative power.

Presented by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, Global Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Politics at The New School for Social Research, and The New School.