RESEARCH IN PROGRESS SEMINAR SERIES

AT THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Friday 27th February, 4.30 pm

Making relations visible: corporate form and the aesthetics of transparency investigations

Taras Fedirko, Durham University

This event is free, but places must be booked.  To book tickets please go to: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rai-research-in-progress-taras-fedirko-tickets-14534173103

Based on an on-going fieldwork among London-based NGO professionals, my paper sets out to discuss campaigns for transparency of extractive industries that seek to hold companies and individuals to account by demonstrating their involvement in global ‘shadow systems’ that presumably facilitate political corruption and undermine development. I focus on one specific aspect of such transparency campaigns, namely how, why and to what effect campaigners seize on, deconstruct and politicise the distinction between human persons and the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Using diagrams of relations between ‘real’ and ‘legal’ persons that campaigners regularly produce as my analytical entry point, I ask what such ‘transparency devices’ make visible; how the knowledge they produce becomes efficacious through what they leave out or make invisible; and what are the normative visions of relationality and forms of the global that they produce.