“From Surveillance to Recognition: Counting as Visibility”
Discussant: Anna Prior, Department of Comparative Human Development

Abstract

In the lead-up to and throughout the 2020 US Decennial Census, the Trump administration sought to exclude immigrants from the apportionment base overtly, by compiling citizenship data that could be used to subtract immigrants from census totals, and covertly, by decreasing census participation in the first place, or otherwise undermining census data. Broadly, my dissertation is an ethnographic study of the mobilization to avert such an undercount in the 2020 Census in Chicago. It draws on over a year of fieldwork to explore the affective, political, and interpretive work of census counting that goes into determining who counts. I center the professional actors outside of the Census Bureau, including elected officials, service providers, organizers, and civil rights activists, who were engaged in the effort to count residents who they gloss as “hard to count,” including undocumented immigrants. This chapter examines how, as visibility became an idiom, or a characteristic way of speaking about counting, they reframed counting as entailing a positive form of visibility to the state—self-definition, truth, and even resistance—in lieu of racialized surveillance. In so doing, they worked to regain some agency against destabilizing and exhausting Trump administration actions and directly invoke the politics of counting. At the same time though, framing count as visibility did not escape its many contradictions. I argue that, while translating counting into visibility allowed for some critique, most notably of the Trump administration or of the race and ethnicity categories present and absent from the form, it also reaffirmed a faith in numbers, in the institutions of democracy, and in broader narratives of American progress.