Nina
Amelung

Nina is sociologist and research fellow at ICS since November 2020. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the Technical University of Berlin in February 2018 with a thesis entitled “Democracy Under Construction: The Micro-politics of Ordering Transnational Citizen Engagement”. She expanded her expertise she developed throughout her PhD-thesis and developed her current main research theme since 2016 when she joined the ERC-funded project EXCHANGE (first based at CES Coimbra, later at CECS/University of Minho). Her research interests lie at the intersection of Sociology of Culture, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Migration Studies. While addressing how particular social groups and wider publics are affected by different biometric database systems, she explores relations between emergent publics, matters of citizenship and biometric technologies applied in migration and crime control regimes. In her current project entitled “Affected (non)publics: Social and political implications of transnational biometric databases in migration and crime control (AFFECT)” Nina explores the social and political implications of growing database infrastructures – in particular their design, governance and implementation – on understanding and regulating affected publics. It is positioned at the interface of 3 fields of scholarship and societal relevance: critical migration and security studies; sociology of culture; science and technology studies accounts on making publics. She brings these fields together under a sociological gaze for exploring the problem of the silent social change brought about by biometric identification technologies in democratic societies and for reflexive engagement. The project studies two examples of systems set up for crime and migration control purposes in the EU: the decentralized forensic DNA data exchange system regulated under the Prüm decisions and the centralized fingerprint database system EURODAC. The study approaches those systems at EU level and from two country application sites: Portugal and Germany.