Larissa Vetters is a senior research fellow at the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Trained in sociocultural anthropology and administrative sciences, she has conducted research on external state-building and administrative reforms in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and more recently on migration and administrative law in Germany. Together with Olaf Zenker, she currently heads the sub-project “Sentiments of Bureaucracies: Affective Dynamics in the Digital Transformation of German Immigration Management”  in the CRC “Affective Societies”. In her research and writing, she combines ethnographic explorations of transformation processes in state and society with a theoretical interest in the effects and uses of public law.

Panel "Affect Works": Affective Digital Bureaucracies: Affective Afterlives of Digitalizing Diversity in the Administration of Migration in Germany

28th May 11.30 am – 01.00 pm | Larissa Vetters & Olaf Zenker

We take up the conference’s invitation to consider the multiple intertwined processes of institutionalizing diversity and their affective repercussions within and beyond institutional settings, by exploring how these play out in that field of German public administration which is tasked with the management of immigration and integration. Focusing on the BAMF, the federal office for migration and refugees, we trace the affective afterlives of administratively and statistically domesticating plurality into contingent forms of diversity. We will present four snapshots of how knowledge about diversity is at the same time processed and produced within the BAMF. We conclude with a reflection on how work affects and affects work in and through these processes.