Dr Sverre Molland, School of Archaeology & Anthropology, The Australian National University

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

Several scholars have pointed to how grid-like visions of society – such as Foucault’s panopticon and Scott’s notion of the synoptic – are poorly equipped to analyse the contemporary world where mobility increasingly has become a “way of life” for both the privileged and marginalised. Rather than grid-like visioning constituting an epistemological crisis, this essay explores how a sedentary optics of the mobile can serve particular ends. By examining anti-trafficking projects along the Lao-Thai border, I argue that what appears to be a problem of sedentariness is central to the functioning of these programs. Through grid-like manoeuvres to “see” and objectify mobile subjects, a space is opened up where a play of absences and presences takes hold of activities. Hence, mobility (in this case migrants and presumed victims of trafficking) serves as a lubricant which makes slippages between the real and the imagined to operate seamlessly within anti-trafficking activities. Rather than anti-trafficking moulding the exterior world in totalising ways, sedentary strategies of making mobile subjects legible for programmatic interventions allows for peculiar distance-making and navel-gazing manoeuvres.