The Design Politics of the Passport presents an innovative study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of ‘design politics’. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political, and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects.Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others - and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.
Mahmoud Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
1. Introduction: Design, politics and the mobility regimeThe politics of design and the design of politicsBeyond a representative deviceMobility regimes: practices, performances and articulationsTravellers without the ‘right’ papersPassport situations2. HistoriesHaving the ‘right’ paperThe danger of moving actorsKnowing the unknown at distanceThe agent of empireTechnologies of racialization and genderingStateless by passportRedesigning by stampsPassports of the unitedSame technologies, different power3. PowerObjectsPolitical ecologiesBodiesTechnologiesEconomiesInterfacesManipulations4. PassportingMaterialitiesI: how thick is your passport? II: If one can make a passport, one can remake it tooSensibilitiesI: I have not seen such a passport before! II: today, you are going to be a South Korean! Part-takingI: I am a citizen now! II: I have flushed down my passportTranslatingI: where does this passport come from? II: who speaks Hebrew? 5. DissentCriminalization of migration brokeryDifferent brokers of the mobility regimeMigration brokers of the world, unite! We police the policeForged passports as material dissentsCritical designers of the mobility regimeThe violence of material critique6. The design politicsAn articulatory practiceVulnerability of designEthics of design NotesReferencesIndexAcknowledgements
Keshavarz makes a series of important points about postcoloniality, race, and gender in determining the privileges and prejudices intertwined in the act of travelling across borders.