Towards a Typology of Data Activism in Migration Governance: Epistemic Alignment and Infrastructural Interdependence

Data increasingly shapes political struggles around migration, as actors across public, private, and civil society domains mobilize digital traces to support or contest public policies or particular modes of governance. Civil society groups, journalists, academics and many more have started using digital tools to develop knowledge claims that actively seek to counter hegemonic regimes of knowledge or non-knowledge in migration and border control. Emerging phenomena include open-source intelligence projects, digital witnessing or the platformization of governance; and the actors behind them span the ideological spectrum from progressive to conservative/reactionary. This paper offers a conceptual contribution to debates on transboundary data interdependencies by developing a typology of data activism in migration governance. I argue that actors engaging in migration- and border-related data activism enact different relationships to institutional knowledge regimes (epistemically aligned vs. epistemically oppositional) and rely on distinct forms of data infrastructure (centralized vs. dispersed). The first dimension, epistemic alignment, captures whether actors support, enable or complement institutional knowledge regimes or whether they challenge, scrutinize or bypass official knowledge orders. The second dimension, infrastructural interdependence, distinguishes between centralized data infrastructures (state-run, corporate, or platform-managed systems) and dispersed infrastructures (open-source, user-generated, or grassroots data ecologies). I will draw on empirical evidence from the EU and the U.S. to illustrate how recent examples of data activism from Border Forensics, ICERaid, or content creating immigrants shape the politics of knowledge production in international migration.