Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to use a border as a frame for togetherness? This paper examines how this tension is made to work in information technology for interoperability in disaster response to critically examine the ethics of responsibility, care, and contestation around risk.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks: what does it mean to use a border as a frame for togetherness? Disasters planning and mitigation in Europe is increasingly becoming a project based in cross-border collaboration. This work is premised on the utopian notion that if these actors in different places and with different practices could work together we would all have more common understandings of shared risks and thus be better prepared and equipped to respond. Solutions frequently are based in information technology and their infrastructures that create algorithmic, ontological, and machine learning frameworks intended to provide a structure to support bringing actors together. But this problem of risk and borders is not just that more natural, technological, or social hazards are increasingly crossing borders so more sharing is needed or that there is an increased risk if this data is not shared over borders. It is that borders - national, jurisdictional, or institutional - are increasingly playing a role in how we organize information and understand risk. Drawing on research from multiple European projects to design technologies for interoperability in disaster response (IN-PREP.eu, SecInCoRe.eu) this paper explores this tension between borders and designed togetherness to critically examine the ethics of responsibility, care, and contestation around risk.