S.E. Freeman

Job title: 
PhD Candidate
Department: 
Geography
Research interests: 
Fellowship Year(s): 2021
Project/Theme Title: Quantifying Need: Humanitarian Technology and Mobility in South Sudan
Abstracts: This research explores how technology and quantification within humanitarian responses to internal displacement mediate the valuation of human suffering and humanitarian need. As contained sites such as camps and detention centers mark an increasingly small proportion of displaced persons in need of aid, humanitarian organizations are turning to biometric registration and other digital tools to identify, categorize, and render visible highly mobile populations. This project asks how these tools, the categories they rely on, and the statistics they generate make some forms of movement legible over others and shape how humanitarian actors prioritize the delivery of assistance. What does it mean to quantify mobility as an indicator of humanitarian need? My research explores how this differentiation is enacted, contested, and encoded in South Sudan, where the majority of the country’s 1.6 million internally displaced persons live outside of a camp setting yet continue to move through and receive services within them.
Fellowship Year(s): 2020
Project/Theme Title: Humanitarian Biometrics: Governing Mobility in South Sudan

Country Expertise: