New Books in Political Science Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
Feb 3, 2026
Frank Billet, a UC Berkeley cultural anthropologist/geographer studying borders and sovereignty, and Lisa Min, an anthropologist of visuality focused on North Korea, discuss redaction as a multimodal practice. They explore redaction’s origins in workshops and fieldwork, visual and poetic experiments, printing and design challenges, algorithmic constraints, ethical and safety tradeoffs in research, and how redaction creates ambiguous, generative spaces.
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Redaction As Method And Aesthetic
- Redaction can be an aesthetic and methodological form, not only state concealment.
- The editors expanded redaction into multimodal creative practices across disciplines.
Letters From The Depthless Deep
- Lisa Min used redaction to render unsayable field experiences from North Korea as grainy, corridor-like images.
- She composed letters, then physically blacked things out to preserve tone and intimacy while protecting people.
Formality Meets Printing Limits
- The book intentionally experiments with visual form and printing constraints to enact redaction.
- Editors had to 'trick' printers and algorithms to realize visual redactions like white pages and a redacted cover.
