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.
By:
Mahmoud Keshavarz (University of Gothenburg Sweden.)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 386g
ISBN: 9781474289399
ISBN 10: 1474289398
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 13 December 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. INTRODUCTION: DESIGN, POLITICS AND THE MOBILITY REGIME The politics of design and the design of politics Beyond a representative device Mobility regimes: practices, performances and articulations Travellers without the ‘right’ papers Passport situations 2. HISTORIES Having the ‘right’ paper The danger of moving actors Knowing the unknown at distance The agent of empire Technologies of racialization and gendering Stateless by passport Redesigning by stamps Passports of the united Same technologies, different power 3. POWER Objects Political ecologies Bodies Technologies Economies Interfaces Manipulations 4. PASSPORTING Materialities I: how thick is your passport? II: If one can make a passport, one can remake it too Sensibilities I: I have not seen such a passport before! II: today, you are going to be a South Korean! Part-taking I: I am a citizen now! II: I have flushed down my passport Translating I: where does this passport come from? II: who speaks Hebrew? 5. DISSENT Criminalization of migration brokery Different brokers of the mobility regime Migration brokers of the world, unite! We police the police Forged passports as material dissents Critical designers of the mobility regime The violence of material critique 6. THE DESIGN POLITICS An articulatory practice Vulnerability of design Ethics of design NOTES REFERENCES INDEX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mahmoud Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Reviews for The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent
Mahmoud Keshavarz's original and evocative book, The Design Politics of the Passport, blasts conventional design studies out of the water, brilliantly exposing design's role in making a world that contains and controls certain subjects more than others. * Alison J. Clarke, Chair of Design History and Director of the Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria * In this provocative book, Mahmoud Keshavarz puts into question reigning notions of critical design, national identity, illegality, forgery, and much more. He does this by unravelling a seemingly mundane designed artefact: the passport, shifting attention from the design of passports to what passports design as they act in the world. As such, this is an exemplary study of ontological designing in action, and an important book for thinking the inter-relation of design and politics. The sharp theoretical analysis is grounded in, and enriched by, case studies of the effects of regimes of passporting on individual lives. The Design Politics of the Passport is timely in its address to the uneven distribution of rights of movement in a world where political, economic and climatic catastrophes are compelling increasing numbers of people to be on the move. * Anne-Marie Willis, Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia *
