Mark Maguire, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, will talk about “Migration and Bio-Surveillance: Irish and Other Examples,” from 12:30-1:30 p.m. April 10 in the Albertsons Library McCain Room on the Boise State University campus. Maguire’s lecture is free and open to the public.
If you have passed through an airport recently you will have left your fingerprints and a digital version of your face behind. Biometric security is one of the core responses to the threat of terrorism, but it is also a central pillar of immigration policy, border control, e-government and social security. 

 

From Disneyland to Australian asylum policy, biometrics is the buzzword. Ireland is no exception. Ireland has been transformed since the 1990s into a major destination for migrants from other countries. More than 10 percent of Ireland’s population is foreign-born. The country moved rapidly to develop immigration policies in line with European Union and international trends and engaged in heated debates about border security, citizenship, and social services. This lecture will take the topic of biometric security as a way through which to discuss these new technologies and throw light on the issue of immigration into Ireland.

 

Maguire is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the National University of Ireland-Maynooth. He is studying biometrics, immigration and the Irish state, and is teaching a course on the anthropology of violence during his fellowship at Stanford.
Maguire received his doctorate from the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis; his doctoral dissertation was published as “Differently Irish: A Cultural History Exploring 25 Years of Vietnamese-Irish Identity” in 2004. He is editing a book on Dublin, which will be published by Lilliput in 2008, and is working with the artist and photographer Maeve Hickey on a project about United States immigration to Ireland. He is also directing a project to improve services to asylum seekers in reception centers in Ireland.

 

This Brown Bag lecture is sponsored by Albertsons Library, the Osher Institute, the Boise State Honors College, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Criminal Justice and the Western Institute for Irish Studies.