Mahmoud Keshavarz
About Mahmoud Keshavarz
Mahmoud Keshavarz is a Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. He holds a PhD in Interaction Design and a Readership (Docent) in Cultural Anthropology. His work focuses widely on the politics of design and the design of politics and how different material practices shape everyday perception and possibilities of (un)doing politics. His writings address a wide range of discourses such as design politics and ethics, design theory, participatory design and design anthropology. His current research particularly examines intersections between design, anthropology, border politics and the question of (de-)coloniality and addresses the violent yet imaginative capacities of materialities of (im)mobility.
Keshavarz is the author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (Bloomsbury 2019), which examines the politics of (im)mobility and dissent through the artefact of passport and the act of passport forgery using ethnography. He has a co-edited volume forthcoming from Pluto Press titled “Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below”. His articles and essays have appeared in Design Issues, Borderlands, Design Philosophy Papers, Design and Culture, Journal of Modern Craft, Law Text Culture, and e-flux among others.
He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Design and Culture, and a Research Associate at Engaging Vulnerability, as well as founding member of Decolonizing Design and Critical Border Studies.
Before joining the University of Gothenburg, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University (2017-2020). He has also organized and directed courses in design at Malmö University and Linnaeus University and in anthropology at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. In 2014, he was a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
At HDK-Valand, he is responsible for integrating design studies into curriculum across three master programs in design. He co-supervises three PhD students, one at HDK-Valand and two at Uppsala University.
Current Research Projects:
Smuggling as a Technical Critique of Borders (2017-2020) – funded by Engaging Vulnerability Research Program
This is an ethnographic as well as designerly inquiry into smugglers’ tacit knowledge of borders as a particular mode of technical critique of borders.
PLACED: Accommodating refugees and asylum seekers and the spatial production of hospitality and otherness (2020-2023) – funded by Formas
The project will study how the Other is imagined through different material and visual spatial strategies that form political discourses at the nexus of accommodation and displacement. It will include studying: temporary accommodation for refugees in urban neighborhoods, emergency shelters in camps, and detention and deportation centers.
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Violent Compassions: Humanitarian Design and the Politics of
Borders
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design Issues - 2020-01-01 -
Citizenship
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon - 2020-01-01 -
Vulnerable Critical Makings: Migrant Smuggling by Boats and Border
Transgression
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Visuals, Materialities - 2020-01-01 -
Migration: Editorial
Introduction
Erling Björgvinsson, Nicholas De Genova, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Tintin Wulia
PARSE Journal - 2020-01-01 -
Art &
Migration
Erling Björgvinsson, Nicholas De Genova, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Tintin Wulia
PARSE Journal - 2020-01-01 -
The Magic of
Borders
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Shahram Khosravi
e-flux - 2020-01-01 -
Partitioning Vulnerabilities: On the Paradoxes of Participatory Design in the City of
Malmö
Erling Björgvinsson, Mahmoud Keshavarz
Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture - 2020-01-01 -
Border
Hospitality
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Discover Society - 2020-01-01 -
The Violence of Humanitarian
Design
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design Philosophy Reader - 2019-01-01 -
Sketch for a Theory of Design
Politics
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of the Right-Wing Populism - 2019-01-01 -
Designers and Brokers of the Mobility
Regime
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things - 2019-01-01 -
Vulnerable Critical
Makings
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Socially Engaged Design Conference 2019 - 2019-01-01 -
Targeted by Persuasion: Military Uniform and the Legal Matter of Killing in
War
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Amin Parsa
Law Text Culture - 2019-01-01 -
A Manifesto for Decolonising
Design
Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canli, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Pedro Oliveira, Luiza Prado, Tristan Schultz
Journal of Futures Studies - 2019-01-01 -
The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and
Dissent
Mahmoud Keshavarz
- 2019-01-01 -
The Politics of Borders in the Emergence of Modern Swedish
Craft
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Christina Zetterlund
Journal of Modern Craft - 2019-01-01 -
Shared Ground: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Craft
Studies
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Shared Ground: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Craft Studies - 2018-01-01 -
Undesigning Borders: Urban Spaces of Borders and Counter-Practices of
Looking
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Undesign: Critical Perspectives in the Intersection of Art and Design - 2018-01-01 -
Orientations of Europe: Boats, the Mediterranean Sea and the Materialities of Contemporary Mobility
Regimes
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Eric Snodgrass
Borderlands e-journal - 2018-01-01 -
Decolonizing
Design
Tristan Schultz, Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canlı, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Luiza Prado de O. Martins , Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira
Design and Culture - 2018-01-01 -
Editors’ Introduction: Decolonizing
Design
Tristan Schultz, Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canlı, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira
Design and Culture - 2018-01-01 -
What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A
Roundtable
T. Schultz, D. Abdulla, A. Ansari, E. Canli, Mahmoud Keshavarz, M. Kiem, L. P. D. Martins, Pjsv de Oliveira
Design and Culture - 2018-01-01 -
Care / Control: Notes on Design, Compassion and
Violence
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design + Power: The Sixth Nordic Design Research Conference: NORDES 17 - 2017-01-01 -
Material Practices of Power – part II: Forged Passports as Material
Dissents
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design Philosophy Papers - 2016-01-01 -
Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and
Borders
Mahmoud Keshavarz
- 2016-01-01 -
Passet och dess görande av kroppar, nationaliteter och
stater
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Konsthantverk I Sverige Del 1 - 2015-01-01 -
Design and the Question of
History
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Journal of Design History - 2015-01-01 -
Material Practices of Power – Part I: Passports and
Passporting
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Design Philosophy Papers - 2015-01-01 -
Uncræft : ‘The Unqualified’, ‘The Illegal’ and the Making Practices of
Roma
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Asylstafetten: Crafts, Politics - 2014-01-01 -
The Asylum March, Crafts,
Politics
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Maria Svensson
- 2014-01-01 -
Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design
Research
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Ramia Mazé
Design Philosophy Papers - 2013-01-01