Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech Initiatives

Abstract

When tech initiatives end, the artifacts they leave behind continue to impact stakeholders. Following an orientation toward broken world thinking, our study introduces the concept of documental afterlives to refer to the range of fates to which these digital artifacts have fallen. In this paper, we systematically review the 118 websites listed in a publicly available database of refugee tech initiatives in Germany as they appear today. We identify that documental afterlives of these projects fall into categories of being broken, unattended, and memorialized. Given the value and impact of these artifacts, we argue that an ethical response to these afterlives requires that we attend to them through stewardship, centering the notion of care and drawing from archival practices. On an empirical level, this paper contributes an updated understanding of how the traces of our initiatives appear long after many of them have ended. Conceptually, our notion of documental afterlives calls on us to attend to the artifacts that we leave behind, recognizing their continued entanglement in social relationships.