(Block)chains as liberation? Rohingya experiments with emergent technologies in postsovereign space

Individuals of the Rohingya ethnicity, a predominantly Muslim group that has been enduring protracted ethnic cleansing from northern Arakan state of Myanmar since 1978, have taken refuge across greater Asia. The Rohingya Project, a Rohingya-led social enterprise, has been attempting to use blockchain technology to both grant individual Rohingya digital identities and create an archive of the entire ethnicity. The seminar explores this project's entailments: at the individual level, can stateless persons become legal/economic subjects without state ratification? How could they interface with and recreate ‘real’ material state spaces, in which national security imperatives militate against such existential experimentation? At the macro scale, can a political community be digitally created? And what counts as 'authentic data' about that community - and who has the authority to decide?