Reality Check: Citizenship, Borders, and the Politics of Belonging
Creative Cultural Analysis | Visual Storytelling | Citizenship Theory
Reality Check is a creative cultural analysis that interrogates citizenship, passports, and borders through a reimagined “passport” format. Drawing on real legal cases, political theory, and lived experiences, the project translates complex debates around nationality, statelessness, indigeneity, and security into an accessible visual narrative.
Rather than presenting findings in a traditional academic report, this project uses speculative design and narrative case studies to expose how citizenship is a politically constructed, unstable, and unevenly distributed status. Therefore, shaping one’s privileges of mobility, rights, and belonging across race, religion, and geography.
Key Findings / Insights
Citizenship functions as a form of inherited privilege, comparable to untaxed inheritance.
Borders are not neutral; they reproduce colonial, racial, and geopolitical hierarchies.
Legal citizenship does not guarantee protection, while non-citizens often perform civic life without rights.
Post-9/11 security regimes have justified intensified surveillance and exclusion of Muslim and racialized bodies, but also normalized the encroaching of surveillance on public spaces to impact all citizens.
Statelessness and precarious citizenship expose gaps between human rights frameworks and state practices.
Introduction: A Message from the Authors
On My Way!
On My Way!
Middle Class Aspiration in Cairo & Jakarta
A deep dive into the factors that are influencing the shift of middle class culture and survival-hood in two of the most cosmopolitan Muslim majority megacities of the world. What consumption reveals about modern identity, its problems and solutions.
