Date: September 3, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 4:30-5:30pm
Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Senthorun Raj (Professor of Legal Humanities and Human Rights, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Migration systems use technologies to classify individuals and police borders. These systems are underpinned by institutionalised suspicion, hostility, and scrutiny of those who seek asylum. For those seeking to successfully claim asylum on the basis of their sexuality, for example, evidencing their “queerness” when articulating their claims, and subsequently having their queerness adjudicated, is difficult because sexuality is private, often hidden, and is not easily verified by existing governance techniques that demand individual accountability. Facial recognition technologies purport to alleviate some of these governance problems. Many states currently use this type of “artificial intelligence” (AI) to verify a person’s identity, and scientists are exploring how facial recognition technologies can predict sexuality. While there is limited evidence of widespread use of biometric tools for these specific asylum purposes, the history of several governments relying on caricatured, invasive, and exploitative evidence gathering techniques in relation to sexual minorities (projective personality tests, photographs of sexual acts, phallometric testing) warn of how AI can be utilised. Drawing from critical theory, asylum case law, and speculative writing, this seminar will outline a prefiguration of facial recognition technologies in refugee decision-making about sexuality in order to confront AI’s governance uses and its truth-making possibilities. This critical-creative conceptual work is important to explore epistemological, methodological, political, and ethical questions about the ways in which facial recognition might be used for assessing sexuality-based refugee claims and what the turn towards predictive technologies reveal about the limits of asylum decision-making when it comes to predicting identity, emotion, and experience.
Professor Senthorun Raj is a Chair in Legal Humanities and Human Rights at Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University and Leverhulme Research Fellow. His academic work takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to examining the relationship between emotion, culture, race, migration, gender, sexuality, law, and text across different jurisdictions. He is the author of two monographs, Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020) and The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). He has also co-edited two collections, The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025). He currently serves on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies and Palgrave’s Socio-Legal StudiesBook Series.
Chair: Marco Wan, Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=108999.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.