Research Seminar in Cultural Anthropology with Mahmoud Keshavarz

By drawing on ethnographic and historical accounts of migrant smuggling and forgery from the smugglers’ perspectives, this talk shifts the focus from a state-centric understanding of smuggling as a criminal activity conducted by ‘greedy’ individuals and ‘mafia rings’, to a specific form of practice that operates through a series of concrete material techniques. I argue that smuggling recognises and reworks the material and technological features of borders which are vulnerable to reappropriation. Smuggling by reworking these features not only reconfigures the apparatus of borders to provide support for those who are denied access to mobility, but also can teach us something about a specific mode of critique that I call a material mode of critique. The material mode of critiquing borders goes beyond a discursive mode which mostly locates politicians, academics, and activists as the critics of border politics. This mode can open up new possibilities of thinking about and against borders.

Mahmoud Keshavarz is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University. His work focuses on how borders are shaped by the materials, images, designs, and technologies that have emerged through colonialism and continue to shape our imagination about mobility in the present and future. 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 (Pluto Press, 2022).