S. E. Freeman

S.E. FREEMAN, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Quantifying Mobility: An Ethnography of Humanitarian Data Collection in South Sudan,’ supervised by Dr. Michael Watts. The dissertation explores the hierarchies of value and modes of categorization at work within humanitarian data collection, and how such evaluation is enacted through the use of biometric registration. 2.2 million people are considered internally displaced within South Sudan and the biometric data of over five million South Sudanese are held by humanitarian agencies as a prerequisite for the distribution of assistance. This grant facilitated nine months of remote and in-person research in the country attending to the discursive and material practices through which displacement is categorized, measured, and quantified. Research activities consisted of in-depth interviews with aid workers and donors across the humanitarian system in addition to following the categories, spreadsheets, headcounts, and technical objects that comprise the data collection landscape. Preliminary findings suggest that while biometrics might not change how individual eligibility for assistance is determined, the linking of identity and place within a rigid, technical system can both obscure existing hierarchies of difference embedded within evaluations of need while reinforcing place-based interventions that can limit freedom of movement.