The Design Politics of the Passport

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 Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor of Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (2022).

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