Tracking Pandemic Borderscapes

Purpose:

The COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of governing the “health crisis” have not only led to buttressing the authority of the state apparatus over the organization of communal life but also to the emergence of new forms of precarious mobility and immobility. COVID-19 devastated economies, and the entrenchment of “hard borders” has spurred a paradoxical phenomenon in which immobilization has been interlaced with complex forms of displacement.

The purpose of this project is to create a digital archive on 'pandemic borderscapes', a term we use to describe highly conflictual and precarious environments where individuals on the move experience entrapment or displacement pressures to move onward.

The archive will consist primarily of official tweets from Twitter news accounts. The material in the archive is manually annotated according to relevant key topics. The topics are then used experimentally to construct a text classifier to identify future pertinent tweets to these key topics.

Participants:

Department of Politics and Society (SSH), CALDISS (SSH) & CLAAUDIA.