Papers, Please! On Discovering Privilege

Drawing on her moves from Germany to Israel and China, Kerstin Tomiak asks the question of who gets offered and who can take a job abroad. The chapter explores passport privilege and how this privilege is discovered by an academic from the global North with a ‘coveted’ and door-opening passport and citizenship. Passport inequality is known and often felt and experienced by scholars from the global South, who might miss out on academic conferences and collaboration opportunities because of visa problems. Having German citizenship, Kerstin describes how, in order to understand and recognise her passport privilege fully, she needed to experience a visa application as the fearsome, Kafkaesque situation where one's life choices are dependent on the unclear and invisible work and decisions of a government administration that it so often is for people with so-called ‘weaker’ passports. With this, the chapter points to the difference between ‘known knowledge’ and ‘experienced knowledge’; further, it asks the question of who can get and take a job abroad.