Mahmoud Keshavarz, Postdoctoral Researcher, Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University
The Design Politics of the Passport
In this seminar, I will present my recently published book, The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent. It is an interdisciplinary study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of what I call ‘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 and Ethnology, Uppsala University. He is the author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent (Bloomsbury), co-founder of Decolonizing Design group and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture.
