18.2. REPAIR Scholarly Talk by Kaarina Nikunen

Join us for the next REPAIR Scholarly Talk with Professor Kaarina Nikunen (University of Tampere). Her presentation, Border break-down: digital infrastructures of human smuggling, will be held on 18 February at 16:15 in the University of Helsinki Main Building, room U3029 (Unioninkatu 34, 3rd floor). Professor Katja Valaskivi (University of Helsinki) will serve as discussant.

Border break-down: digital infrastructures of human smuggling

In this talk, I discuss the digital infrastructures of human smuggling through the lens of breakage and repair. Cross-border mobility is organized through a complex assemblage of infrastructural systems. In recent years, the securitization and automation of European borders have shaped border practices and made digital infrastructures increasingly central to human mobility—an opportunity that the human smuggling industry has also made use of. These social, political, and economic dynamics profoundly influence both the need for human smuggling and the infrastructures that emerge around it.

Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp have become key marketplaces for smuggling services. They form part of a constellation of technologies, both old and new, that together provide a layered and intricate mobility infrastructure spanning local, transnational, and global scales. For many, this is an essential, intimate infrastructure – something on which their lives depends. It operates simultaneously as a horizon of opportunity and rescue, and as a space of coercive visibility, surveillance and danger. It supports both illicit and mundane labor.

From this perspective, the platformization of human smuggling can be approached as a form of breakage or sabotage: a disruptive practice emerging from specific social and political conditions. At the same time, it exemplifies contradictions and complications of the platform economy—making use of global techno-capitalism, irregular economy and precarious life situations, while also enabling collaborative information sharing in the hope of safer digital passage.

Kaarina Nikunen is Professor of Media and Communication Research at Tampere University. Her areas of expertise include digital culture and datafication, affect and emotions, migration, inequalities, solidarity and social justice.

Her current research focuses on digital infrastructures and human mobility as well as on ways to develop means to tackle hate speech (TACKLEHATE 2025-26). She is the author of Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age (Sage 2019) and editor of Media in Motion: Migration and Cultural Complexity in the Nordic Region (Routledge 2011, with Elisabeth Eide).