Abstract
This dissertation examines the circulation of transnational imaginaries of citizenship, identity, and mobility through a focus on multimodal biometric technology regimes involving sensory input such as sight, hearing, touch, and smell. I refer to the development and exercise of sensory capacities for the maintenance of citizenship and border regimes as sensory work (Møhl 2022; Chaar-López 2019). I ask: How are the senses recruited by illegalization regimes, or in other words, what are the techniques through which border workers and multimodal biometric technologies illegalize people? And what are the central qualities of the violence produced by illegalization? I draw on participant observation, interviews, and photography and filmmaking to study border workers (including law enforcement, identity document examiners, and street-level-bureaucrats) and immigrant rights advocates involved in the design of registration technologies in the United States and the Netherlands. The dissertation argues that sensory work produces sensory violence—a kind of psycho-physical governance resulting from the enforcement of border regimes through the weaponization of the senses and their traces upon the body. I identify and examine four dimensions of sensory violence (fragmentation, exposure, breathlessness, and viscous mobility) through seven sensory meditations. Each chapter is conceived as an exercise in embodiment through which readers can contextualize how registration technologies have been historically used to produce citizenship hierarchies, encounter states induced by these technologies of confinement upon illegalized people and confront some of the dilemmas faced by those involved in identification, registration, and recognition struggles.