Transparency and the Right to Opacity

Associate Professor Nabil Echchaibi joined CU Boulder in 2007 and served as founding chair of the Department of Media Studies.
The question of borders and the practice of bordering persist in a world destined for encounters and confrontations. This persistence today bears resemblance to long-standing legacies of coloniality, modernity, and globalization, but it also foregrounds new narratives, aesthetics, and politics of exclusion and dehumanization. Talk of walls, fortresses, boundaries, and deportation has never been a political or philosophical anomaly, but rather a reflection of a particularistic social imaginary, a linear compulsion of epistemic assumptions that sees the world through the logic of hierarchy, classification, difference, and ontological supremacy.
How does your research background shape your present work around borders and migration? We’re all living contingent histories, and that informs the way we see the world. Growing up, I had a fairly secure sense of identity. I was a Moroccan and a Muslim, and there wasn’t much to argue about, initially. A bilingual education, […]