Un/seeing race Articulating differences in governing people in Europe through multimodal methods

This dissertation examines ways in which technologies of vision used in governance enact race and racial otherness in Europe. Specifically, it focuses on how physical appearances, such as phenotypic markers, clothing, hairstyle, as well as smell, dialect, modes of travelling, databases and statistics play a role in knowing people and governing their mobility. Vision here refers not only to practices of identification but also to the production of physical appearances—a know-how of diverse kinds of markers of difference. Consequently, technologies of vision also refer to what the phenotype does and how it is produced as a conjunction between subject, technology and see-er. The first part of this dissertation examines the ways in which knowing “the Roma” in everyday bureaucratic and border police practices in Romania enacts racialised categories of people. The second part draws on empirical cases from the Netherlands and Greece to examine more broadly the enactments of race in practices of identification. The last three chapters of the dissertation are written in a multimodal format where I intertwine written and filmic paragraphs. Vision itself becomes a technology, this time not to produce or reinforce but to disturb and perhaps even undo ideas of racial otherness. By actively engaging the eyes of the viewer, I demonstrate that vision is always relational and partial and therefore can also be harnessed to undo racial otherness by fragmenting, multiplying, and affecting.