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Redaction Inverted: Erasure Poetry and the Intent to Reveal

Chapter of: Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State(pp. 121–135)

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Metadata
TitleRedaction Inverted
SubtitleErasure Poetry and the Intent to Reveal
ContributorRachel Douglas-Jones(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0466.1.08
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/redacted-writing-in-the-negative-space-of-the-state/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightRachel Douglas-Jones
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2024-10-27
Long abstractWhat would redaction look like as an act of revelation? In this contribution, I lay out an engagement with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through erasure poetry, framing the results as a form of public anthropology of policy and bureaucracy. The GDPR came into force in Europe in 2018, affording newly created ‘data subjects’ new relations with their data. Using events in the UK and Denmark as examples, I put forward erasure poetry of policy, regulation and legislation as anaesthetic, practical and political intervention that seeks the inverse of what redaction is – in its legal intent – created for. Erasure poems leave behind only what the new author wishes to leave, revealing only words that are already there. It can make those words betray themselves, to reveal the meaning they had all along or given them a new inflection entirely opposite to their intended weight. I suggest that such capacities offer powerful means for managing voice, anonymity and creativity in charged ethnographic situations. I also view the deceptive simplicity of the act of erasure poetry as a means by which ethnographers and those with whom they work can speak with and through official wor(l)ds.
Page rangepp. 121–135
Print length15 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • GDPR
  • bureaucracy
  • erasure poetry
  • data protection
  • participatory ethnography
  • policy
Contributors

Rachel Douglas-Jones

(author)
Associate Professor of Anthropological Approaches to Data and Infrastructure at IT University of Copenhagen
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9562-6572

Rachel Douglas-Jones is an Associate Professor of Anthropological Approaches to Data and Infrastructure at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is the head of the Technologies in Practice research group, and PI of the Moving Data, Moving People project (2020–2026). Recent publications include participation in the editorial collective of The Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (Palgrave, 2022), and Towards an Anthropology of Data (with Antonia Walford and Nick Seaver, JRAI, 2021).