In 2020, I participated in an online workshop on redaction, presenting the erasure poetry created in ETHOS Lab as part of research into and engagement around the General Data Protection Regulation. The workshop, hosted by Lisa Min, Charlene Mackley and Franck Billé, put this work into conversation with redaction in the field, both in materials ethnographers would seek to access, and as a potential fieldwork method. It also invited us, in the still newly-online pandemic world, to create our own erasures – digitally. Here’s mine!

In the time since, we have met online and shared comments and feedback on draft chapters for a collection on Redaction with punctum press.

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes — a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. In critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume examines up close and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that figure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people — age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.

This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as an experimental practice that can open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.

My chapter emphasises what redaction can give, rather than waht it takes away. It invites ethnographers to consider participatory erasure with interlocutors in the field, as a means of discussing texts, policies, challenging political realities, hopes, futures, and more.

The wonderful editors Lisa, Charlene and Franck have been able to include images from one of my favourite early erasure poets (although she didn’t consider herself one) Doris Cross and work from poet Sarah Howe, both of whom were very inspirational to the ETHOS GDPR work. I am looking forward to seeing the collection come out in Spring 2024!

It will be open access here:

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/redacted-writing-in-the-negative-space-of-the-state/