LHub Seminar Series: Dr Eve Hayes de Kalaf, Digitising Exclusion: Identity, Citizenship and RightsLogged

Over the next five years, states are continuing to carry out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence by 2030. While international organisations, governments, the tech industry and banks argue that the ‘right’ form of ID guarantees universal access to public and private sector services, emerging research is also evidencing how advances in the implementation of biometric technologies are exacerbating citizenship-stripping practices, statelessness and other modes of exclusion. Drawing upon research conducted in the Caribbean, this paper will explore the multitude of ways in which contemporary ID systems, while promoting social and financial inclusion, can also exclude marginalised and vulnerable populations from essential state services, voting rights and healthcare. The talk will explore the concept of ‘statelessness-like experiences’ (Hayes de Kalaf, 2025) to consider how people can experience exclusion in ways that do not always fit comfortably within the legal parameters of citizenship deprivation, yet can have an overwhelmingly detrimental impact on an individual’s wellbeing and legal personhood. The research presented will highlight how, for the people who experience contemporary ID systems, historical forms of racial and ethnic exclusion remain very much embedded within new technological infrastructures and state architectures. 

Chair: Dr Jake Subryan Richards, LHub & LSE

Speaker: Dr Eve Hayes de Kalaf, based at the Institute of Historical Research, has extensive experience working across Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2021, she organised ‘(Re)Imagining Belonging in Latin America and Beyond: Access to Citizenship, Digital Identity and Rights’ in collaboration with the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)/Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS) and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. Her critically acclaimed book 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner', published with a Foreword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican American author Junot Díaz (2023), examines how states can manufacture, block or deny access to citizens - including the migrant-descended - to their documentation. Her recent work on the AHRC-funded project ‘The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context’ included extensive empirical research across Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. She is currently responsible for overseeing research training in History and the Humanities for the School of Advanced Study, University of London. 

Discussant:  Renaud Morieux is Professor of European History at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the history of migration, oceans, incarceration, international law, and the social history of war since the eighteenth century. He is currently writing a reflexive history of statelessness from the 1920s to the present.
His most recent publications include:
- 'Lost Letters: Epistolary Communities, War, and Familial Ties in the Maritime Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century', Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2025): 1–42
- (with Jeppe Mulich), Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World, Past & Present, Volume 265, Issue Supplement 17, (November 2024) 

The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants.  

This event is free to attend, but booking is required.