Contested Digital Borders from Juárez to Guizhou
In this two part handbook series led by Isadora Bratton-Benfield, the authors present original research on how digital infrastructure is configured in relation to national borders. The handbooks, Mapping Technology and Dissensus: The US-Mexico Border by Isadora Bratton-Benfield and Crosscurrents at the US and China Digital Border by Isadora Bratton-Benfield, Martina Wu, and Xuewei (Sylvia) Luo, are available to view and download below.
Mapping Technology and Dissensus: The US-Mexico Border | Download PDF
By Isadora Bratton-Benfield
In this work, the researcher maps the technologies used for surveillance at the US-Mexico border, alongside artworks that institute dissensus along this boundary. By turning the lens back onto the surveillance apparatus, this guidebook empowers audiences to understand how specific uses of technology at the border sustain violence, predictive analytics, and policing. The author also prompts the viewers to ask how persistently broken border surveillance technologies perform sovereignty, opening new passages for abolishing border surveillance technologies, border closure projects, and the latent hierarchies that they carry.
Crosscurrents at the US and China Digital Border | Download PDF
By Isadora Bratton-Benfield, Chuyue (Martina) Wu, Xuewei (Sylvia) Luo
The researchers track the shifting fields of US-China tech regulation and perform a case study of how each country’s technology industries continue to be enmeshed. They explore how digital infrastructure owned by Apple continues to operate in China and digital infrastructure owned by TikTok continues to operate in the US. This work thus complicates conventional notions of digital sovereignty, referring broadly to control over the movement and use of data, through detailing the overlap of two nation’s technology industries. It also documents the emerging political debates concerning the free flow of data across borders, including how local communities have responded to the presence of Apple and TikTok digital infrastructure.
Isadora Bratton-Benfield is an artist, researcher, and PhD student in the Film & Media Department at UC Berkeley. Her work traces the histories of digital infrastructures and industrial factories, documenting their form as designed architectures that are vernacular and aesthetic. These architectures are therefore political, contributing to the formation of shifting fields of dissensus. She documents how their aesthetic and technical qualities mediate between local ecologies and the global crosscurrent flows of data and information with emphasis on moments of rupture. She is also interested in 20th century traditions of media theory, the philosophy of technology, and political economy. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture. She holds a MSc in Media, Communication, and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Xuewei (Sylvia) Luo is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley from Beijing, majoring in History of Art. She is interested in tech law and entertainment law, with a focus on soft IP litigation. She joined the GDI research team as an Undergraduate Research Apprentice through URAP in Fall 2025, where she contributed to research on US-China digital borders. She will continue her work with GDI as a Summer Research Fellow, supporting the development of GDI Summer Certificate course materials.
Martina Wu is a freshman at UC Berkeley from Shanghai and an intended double major in Global Studies and Data Science (emphasis in Data Arts and Humanities). Having joined the Global Digital Infrastructures team through URAP Fall 2025, she helped produce research on China-US Digital Borders and is currently working on developing materials for GDI Summer Certificate courses.
