So, it turns out that Kuba Jablonowski, Sam Kinsley and I have been successful in an application to the ESRC’s Governance After Brexit programme, part of the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) initiative, for a project entitled ‘Algorithmic politics and administrative justice in the EU Settlement Scheme’ (The EUSS is the UK government scheme designed to determine the post-Brexit UK immigration status of EU citizens and their families who are currently living in the UK under EU free movement law. One might think of the EUSS as a live experiment in how ‘the right to have rights‘ is being enacted in one contemporary context).

The project will run from the start of 2021 through to the end of 2023. Here’s a quick summary:

“The research aims to analyse the process of administrative reform associated with Brexit, and the intersection of this process with the digitalisation of administration and governance in the UK. It takes the evolution of the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) as its empirical entry-point. By investigating how grievances and claims of injustice emerge from the operation of the EUSS and are monitored and challenged in the public sphere, the research will seek to understand how practices of administrative justice are reconfigured by the interaction of automated algorithmic systems with rights-based practices of monitoring, advocacy and litigation.”

Watch this space – I’m sure we’ll post further information as the project gets underway.