People Who Aren’t Really There: ‘Non-persons’ as a field of scholarly inquiry

Recent years have seen previously largely unnoticed groups—frontline health workers, workers along global supply chains, victims of sexual abuse, people who subscribe to outlandish conspiracy theories—suddenly appearing in the limelight.

This project takes a step back and documents the processes through which some people come to be unnoticed in the first place.

NOTREALLYTHERE aims to transform sociologist Erving Goffman’s well-known but undertheorized concept of “non-person” into a fresh field of interdisciplinary inquiry.

The project will interrogate being NOTREALLYTHERE as a representational effect, an interactional achievement, a particular subject position, and an affordance: a feature of life that facilitates some actions, feelings, thoughts, and identities, and that encumbers or blocks others.

It is informed by Foucauldian-inspired theories about how discursive arrangements distribute and influence perception and attention.

But it will complicate those theories and bridge a gap in the literature by conducting detailed case studies, comparing people who frequently are rendered NOTREALLYTHERE against their will or desire (such as migrants or refugees), and others (such as simultaneous interpreters, or artists who intentionally hide their identity), who reap professional rewards, or gain greater freedoms, by consciously doing their best to be NOTREALLYTHERE.

The project examines the axis of perceptibility/imperceptibility, and will document how it is established and contested, by whom, how it matters, and why. It explores the concrete ways in which being NOTREALLYTHERE can be a strategy of power and a tactic of resistance. But it also will document where and how such perspectives fall short and require revision.

Examining willed and unwilled dimensions of being NOTREALLYTHERE in the same framework will lay the foundations for a new field of inquiry that synthesizes research on agnotology (ignorance), visuality, silencing, and social interaction.