Author Archives: Jennifer E. Telesca

About Jennifer E. Telesca

Doctoral candidate at New York University, where she studies law and diplomacy in action. Her ethnography Red Gold: On the Global Politics of Regulating Marine Life opens the black box of global governance, taking the prized bluefin tuna as material to explain how oceans are governed, by whom, for whom, and according to what values and logics. A chapter in the edited volume The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of Flexible Bureaucracies (Berghahn, forthcoming) details some of her findings. Grant agencies such as the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy have supported her research.

Preface: What Is Visual Citizenship?

As an organizing concept, “visual citizenship” treats participation in political life as something operating and experienced beyond legal properties and pregiven juridical frames. After all, much of what we know about the relations between citizens—and between citizens and non-citizens—happens from a distance, among common strangers, audiovisually. What we see and hear, how we see and hear, according to whom, and where condition the way people in acute and everyday crises debate meaningfully about how they are governed. Rights talk beyond mere expressions of victimhood is an important theme.