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 a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

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