Re reading the Borderland Imaginary from 2021

Abstract

This essay re-reads Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga’s “Beyond surveillance and moonscapes: An alternative imaginary of the U.S.–Mexico border wall” (2010) from the position of a design educator engaged with horizontal co-design methods for social and disciplinary change. The essay brings Dorsey and Diaz-Barriga’s ideas into conversation with a selection of relevant visual communication design outcomes and scholarship produced around the same time. It then rereads the value of that transdisciplinary conversation from within the present moment—one complicated, morally charged, and visually saturated by domestic immigration policy.