Processing payments, enacting alterity: Financial technology in the everyday lives of asylum seekers

Bennani-Taylor, S. and Meer, N. (2024) Processing payments, enacting alterity: Financial technology in the everyday lives of asylum seekers. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, (doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2024.2312249) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

This article examines how the Asylum Support Enablement (ASPEN) card – a prepayment card provided to UK asylum seekers – enacts their alterity in ways that problematise the techno-optimist narrative of digital technologies as promoters of financial inclusion. Drawing on analysis of 53 documents alongside 21 interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, advocacy organisations and technology providers, the article proceeds in four steps. First, we trace the migration of Prepaid Financial Services’ (PFS) prepayment technology from the humanitarian context of UNHCR’s Cash Assistance Programme in Greece to its adoption in UK state practices, considering what this means for the mobility of policy norms inscribed in digital technologies. Second, building on the concept of ‘alterity processing’, we examine how the UK Home Office discursively co-constructs asylum seekers as ‘deviant subjects’ and its bureaucratic entities as indispensable. Third, we analyse how this co-construction is used to justify asylum seekers’ exclusion from mainstream banking, rendering them dependent on the ASPEN card. Finally, we elucidate how the card’s surveillance, encoded rules, and induced precarity govern asylum seekers’ behaviours. We thus demonstrate how financial technologies – as deployed across humanitarian and statist welfare contexts – engender new lines of marginalisation and forms of social control.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: MEER, Professor Nasar
• Authors: Bennani-Taylor, S., and Meer, N.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Sociology Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences
• Journal Name: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• ISSN: 1369-183X
• ISSN (Online): 1469-9451
• Published Online: 01 March 2024
• Copyright Holders: Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s)
• First Published: First published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2024
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence