Published in 2025 at “Architecture and Culture” Volume 12, Issue 1-2: Border Fictions; Guest Edited by Paula McCloskey, Sam Vardy and Mohamad Hafeda.
How to lay bare the fictional yet lived sonic dimensions of the border, beyond its spatial conceptualization?
In my work I understand borders as an amalgamation of geopolitical delimitations, social and cultural practices, juridical apparatuses, and material articulations, to argue that the German border is actively listening for “citizenship” in order to constantly create, enforce and sustain it. I do so by analyzing how a specific border technology – the so-called “dialect recognition software” used by the German migration authorities since April 2017 in cases of undocumented asylum seekers – is designed to find and determine legal citizenship by conflating it with a measurement of a dialect expressed through probabilities. I seek to demonstrate how this conflation is false through the following argument: the German software attempts to measure timbre – the material quality of the voice beyond language – and express it as dialect.
My intention is not only to expose this conflation but to understand its designs, while arguing that it concomitantly opens up possbilities of both weaponizing and undoing this fiction of dialect-as-citizenship toward novel, uncertain, and unpredictable ways of being and becoming.
Access the article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2024.2371237