This message is to announce the second session of our seminar on the socio-history of computing for this year 2025-2026, which will take place online and at the Cnam in Paris on Monday 13 october 2025 from 3pm to 5pm (CET) with Lennart Vincent Schmidt et Michael Homberg.

This lecture examines how digitalization, often portrayed as a narrative of modernization and emancipation, has also generated new forms of social stratification. From the 1970s onwards, computer technologies reshaped work, education, governance, and migration regimes in ways that reinforced divides, hierarchies, and boundaries within society. Building on the broader research agenda of Digital Inequalities, the talk highlights the ambivalences of the “digital society” by tracing both the promises of inclusion and the mechanisms of exclusion. In this context, insights from my research on Digital Borders illustrate how the computerization of migration control transformed mobility into data and contributed to the reproduction of inequalities in Germany and Europe.

The Socio-History of Informatics Seminar is a research seminar organized by the HT2S research center of the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (CNAM) in Paris. Every two months, we invite a researcher in the history and/or anthropology and sociology (with a historical or diachronic approach) of computing and informatics to present their work. The seminar aims to explore new narratives in the history of computing and informatics over time, with an emphasis on they intertwine with social, economic, political and cultural issues.