About

Anouk Madörin is a feminist researcher based in Berlin. Before joining the University of Potsdam as a lecturer in Cultural Studies, she was a doctoral fellow of the DFG research training group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” and a visiting scholar at the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. Anouk holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and has studied Gender Studies and Cultural History and Theory in Basel, Berlin and at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis in NYC. Interested in the gendered, sexual and racial genealogies of power, Anouk works at the intersection of Postcolonialism, Critical Migration and Border Studies, Feminist and Media Theory and has published on the racial securitization of Europe’s borders, the sexual politics of border control, and the colonial history of new media.

Anouk’s new book Postcolonial Surveillance investigates the long history of the European border regime, focusing on the colonial forerunners of today’s border technologies. The book takes a longue durée perspective to uncover how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present and has morphed into EU border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. It exposes the racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems and highlights key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, biometric sorting, and deterrent media infrastructure. The technological genealogies assembled in this book reveal the unacknowledged histories that had to be rejected for the seemingly clean, unbiased, and neutral technologies to emerge as such.

Publications 

Books

Postcolonial Surveillance. Europe’s Border and Surveillance Technologies between Colony and Crisis. Challenging Migration Studies Series.London: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2022.

The Sexual Politics of Border Control. New York: Routledge, 2022 (co-edited with M. Pfeifer and B. Holzberg)

Articles

Fungibility at the Border: Selfies, Proxies, and faux (self-)representations. In: Global Digital Media from Intersectional, Queerfeminist and Post- and Decolonial Perspectives, Global Media Studies Journal 11 (2), 2022

The view from above at Europe’s maritime borders. Racial securitization from visuality to postvisuality. European Journal for Cultural Studies 23 (5), 2020

Special Issue

The Sexual Politics of Border Control. Journal for Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (9), 2021 (with M. Pfeifer and B. Holzberg)

Book chapters

Unruly faces. Refugee protest and imperial faciality. In: Dos Santo Bruss, S; Gasser L; von Rath A (ed.) The Minor on the Move: Doing Cosmopolitanisms.Berlin: Edition Assemblage, 2021

Technè. In:  Xiang, Z (ed.) minor cosmopolitan. Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2020