Dr Karine Côté-Boucher is launching her new book Border Frictions: Gender, Generation and Technology on the Frontline, which tells the story of the shift to law enforcement in Canadian border control.

The event is organised by the Security Flows Project based in the Research Centre in International Relations (RCIR) and the International Relations & Ethics Research Theme. The discussion will be chaired by Dr Sarah Perret, research associate and member of the Security Flows Project.

 

Abstract

This book tells the story of the shift to law enforcement in Canadian border control. From the 1990s onward, it traces the transformation of a customs organization into a border-policing agency. Border Frictions investigates how considerable political efforts and state resources have made bordering a matter of security and trade facilitation best managed with surveillance technologies.

Based on interviews with border officers, ethnographic work carried out in the vicinity of land border ports of entry and policy analysis, this book illuminates features seldom reviewed by critical border scholars. These include the fraught circulation of data, the role of unions in shaping the border policy agenda, the significance of professional socialization in the making of distinct generations of security workers and evidence of the masculinization of bordering.

In a time when surveillance technologies track the mobilities of goods and people and push their control beyond and inside geopolitical borderlines, Karine Côté-Boucher unpacks how we came to accept the idea that it is vital to deploy coercive bordering tactics at the land border.

Bio

Trained as a sociologist and an anthropologist, Karine Côté-Boucher is an Associate Professor at l’École de criminologie at Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on border control, migrations and refugees as well as the role of customs controls in the monitoring of supply chains. She is also interested in social and political theory.

She teaches on critical approaches to security, critical border studies and qualitative research methodologies. She has published articles in journals such as Security Dialogue, Social Politics, the British Journal of Criminology and Theoretical Criminology. Her most recent book Border Frictions: Gender, Generation and Technology on the Frontline is published by Routledge.

 

Please register via Zoom, once registered you will be sent an email with the details.