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!
Transhumanism and the Moral Status of AI
In the 1999 academy award winning film, Bicentennial Man, Robert Williams played a robot who fights, legally, for his recognition as a human being. To which, 200 hundred years later, the World Congress grants him such recognition on his deathbed. The movie, based on the sci-fi novel, The Positronic Man, acts almost as a foretold prophecy to the current AI developments of the 21st century. But can AI ever become a moral human? What could change of our human-none-human social dynamics? And how will our definition of ‘human’ change?
