Petra Molnar is an anthropologist and attorney focused on human rights and migration. Molnar, who is based in Toronto, serves as the associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab and as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She has worked on migrant justice causes since 2008, first assisting directly with families resettling in Canada and now as a lawyer and researcher. She is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a book published by The New Press in May exploring surveillance technology along borders across the world, including at the U.S.-Mexico divide. Molnar spoke with the Texas Observer about surveillance tech and borders as a testing ground.
TO: Could you tell me a little bit about the different places you visited for your new book?
This book first started in Canada, but then I ended up traveling and living in Greece for three years, trying to understand how different refugee camps are getting more technology and how biometrics are used. Then I also did some work at the Polish-Belarusian border and other parts of Europe, but I broadened it out to trying to understand the kind of data colonialism in the Kenya-Somalia border, in the occupied Palestinian territories, and also the U.S.-Mexico border. Specifically, I’ve been working in Arizona out of Tucson, but then also in places like Nogales and Sasabe, and working closely with search-and-rescue groups there.
