Asymmetrical Transparency: The Global Politics of Risk Management

The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes the aesthetics of transparency. To appear transparent, passengers must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot — whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age or religion — are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat and subject to search and detention. The talk demonstrates how the aesthetics of transparency has been used to moralize a discriminatory global politics of mobility.