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Samhällsvetenskap, Juridik, Juridik och samhälle, Social Sciences, Law, and Law and Society

In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence to certain legal requirements that exist apart from and prior to war; instead, we suggest, the law of armed conflict in itself cannot but operate through admitting certain materials onto the battlefield as distinctively legal materials. Using the theory of legal materiality, we show that the military uniform is a legal material that makes the legal matter of legitimate targeting intelligible to law. This process happens through the ways in which the uniform shapes the possibility of visual recognition and differentiation in order to make certain bodies targetable and others not targetable. We refer to this visual recognition and differentiation as a domain of persuasion. We show that the historical, functional and visual attributes of the uniform, as a design artefact, produce a convincing domain of distinction for the attacking agent. Finally, we turn to insurgency, arguing that the legal matter of targeting is shaped not only by the presence, use and manipulation of this legal material but also by the absence of it.

Humanities and the Arts, Arts, Art History, Humaniora och konst, Konst, Konstvetenskap, Other Humanities, Cultural Studies, Annan humaniora, Kulturstudier, Social Sciences, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Samhällsvetenskap, Sociologi, Socialantropologi, Other Social Sciences, International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Annan samhällsvetenskap, Internationell Migration och Etniska Relationer (IMER), Ethnology, Etnologi, Kulturantropologi, Cultural Anthropology, modern Swedish craft, Swedishness, borders, vernacular craft, skill, ethnicity, Roma, and Design

Nation states have been imagined and constructed by defining certain identities and practices. Among cultural and economic practices bound to material culture, craft has played a significant role in the processes of imagining communities and consequently nationalities in modern times. These imaginations were produced and sustained by various discursive and materialized borders that were based on simultaneous practices of inclusion and exclusion, targeting certain bodies within the formation of a nation state. In this article, we discuss instances of such bordering in Sweden, by looking at specific state documents of controlling the movement and residence of those who were seen as suspicious and potentially threatening. Among these individuals were craftspeople with religious and/or ethnic backgrounds different than the imagined modern Swedish subjects. They were often represented as a threat to the economic, social, and cultural prosperity of the Swedish nation state. These individuals and groups, and their craft practices, were variously appropriated, erased, included, and excluded by the nation state. This article argues that an understanding of modern Swedish craft is impossible without recognizing the crafts that were excluded from its emergence, articulation, and sustainment over the last hundred years. This is to argue that an understanding of the politics of craft requires recognition of the borders that regulate how—and by whom—craft can be practiced.

Humanities and the Arts, Other Humanities, Ethnology, Humaniora och konst, Annan humaniora, and Etnologi

Social Sciences, Political Science, Samhällsvetenskap, Statsvetenskap, Humanities and the Arts, Arts, Design, Humaniora och konst, Konst, Social and Economic Geography, Social och ekonomisk geografi, Other Social Sciences, International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Annan samhällsvetenskap, Internationell Migration och Etniska Relationer (IMER), Engineering and Technology, Other Engineering and Technologies, Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified, Teknik och teknologier, Annan teknik, Övrig annan teknik, Media Technology, Medieteknik, Technology (byts ev till Engineering), Teknik, boat, migration, mobility regime, Europe, neocolonialism, materiality, Mediterranean Sea, refugees, frontex, Other Humanities, Cultural Studies, Annan humaniora, Kulturstudier, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Sociologi, Socialantropologi, Human Geography, Kulturgeografi, Media and Communications, Media Studies, Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, Medievetenskap, Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalisation Studies), Statsvetenskap (exklusive studier av offentlig förvaltning och globaliseringsstudier), Kulturantropologi, and Cultural Anthropology

This paper is an investigation of how the specific design and materiality of the artefact of the boat, as well as the various material, visual, technical and geographical practices at work in the space of Mediterranean Sea, orientate a specific space and produce a selective politics of seeing, saving and framing of bodies on the move. It highlights how the very presence and movement of ‘unseaworthy boats’ in this actively orientated space of the sea brings to the fore the many strategies and techniques that have been employed to make it a space of European control. We argue that this is an active and deadly orientation carried out in an often dispersed number of practices and interventions within a seemingly flat space of water. The paper concludes that border transgressors’ act of moving by boat, with all of the losses involved, both challenge and potentially reorientate European mobility regimes.

Design, Design Studies, decoloniality, ontological designing, pluriversality, Global South, Art, Social Sciences, Other Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Samhällsvetenskap, Annan samhällsvetenskap, Genusstudier, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Sociologi, Socialantropologi, Kulturantropologi, and Cultural Anthropology

This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.

Humanities and the Arts, Arts, Design, Humaniora och konst, and Konst

Humanities and the Arts, Arts, Design, Humaniora och konst, Konst, Other Humanities, Cultural Studies, Annan humaniora, Kulturstudier, Social Sciences, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Samhällsvetenskap, Sociologi, Socialantropologi, Other Social Sciences, International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Annan samhällsvetenskap, Internationell Migration och Etniska Relationer (IMER), Passports, material articulations, forgery, materialities, sensibilities, part-taking, translating, design politics, borders, irregular migration, Kulturantropologi, and Cultural Anthropology

While mundane for the privileged few, passports, as discussed in the first part of this paper (DPP vol. 13, no. 2), are rather strong, thick and extensive devices of articulating, partitioning and producing possibilities of access, movement and inhabitations in the world. They have emerged from a certain intersection of social and material forces and continue to produce and provide new environments of power relations. It was proposed that these articulations are better to be renamed as passporting, which recognizes the regimes of practices involved in such environments beyond the single artifact of passport. Part II takes much further this analysis through proposing four lines of reading the passporting regime: materialities; sensibilities; part-taking; and translating. These lines, which point to the ontological qualities of passporting, can also be enacted for intervening into the passporting regime which articulates to the current hegemonic order of mobility. I trace such possible interventions in the acts of forgery of passports. Forgery uses, enables, dissents and rearticulates these very four lines of the passporting regime in other directions than the ones imagined by their initial design. By discussing the practices of passport forgery in relation to the passporting regime, this article offers a material and critical understanding of the notions of citizenship and nationality.

Humanities and the Arts, Arts, Design, Humaniora och konst, Konst, Other Humanities, Cultural Studies, Annan humaniora, Kulturstudier, Social Sciences, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Samhällsvetenskap, Sociologi, Socialantropologi, Kulturantropologi, Cultural Anthropology, passport, design politics, borders, irregular migration, forgery, critical design, power, body, materiality, Other Social Sciences, International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Annan samhällsvetenskap, Internationell Migration och Etniska Relationer (IMER), Passports, material articulations, political ecologies, and design and politics

In this paper, passports are investigated as socio-technical artifacts with the capacity of interrogating the relation between design and politics. While they might appear as ‘trivial’ objects for some, passports tend to speak to the current political regime of mobility and more importantly immobility that produces refugee populations and undocumented migrants waiting in camps, transit zones or precarious clandestinity for several months and years. This inquiry in two parts aims to interrogate the artifacts of passport and its artifactual relations and practices – which I call passporting – in relation to the ways in which mobilities and immobilities are organized, controlled, regulated and shaped. Part I presents three interrelated ways of looking at passports: first, the historicity of passports and the ways in which technologies and material practices merge with the political, social and economic interests of specific times and spaces; second, the ways passports function and perform in a network of relations and ecologies which produce continuity as well as uncertainty with different effects, forms and scales in different environments; third, how passports and bodies change their positions constantly in the world in which the difficulties and uncertainties to locate either and/or become desirable space and time for manipulating and exercising power over undesired groups and individuals in local sites through a global rationale.