Connor Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at The New School for Social Research, specializing in global politics and political theory. His research investigates the design history of non-state political identity documents and the broader questions they raise about citizenship, migration, and contemporary forms of power. 

In addition to teaching appointments at the Parsons School of Design and the Columbia University Pre-College Program, he has served as a Research Fellow at the International Rescue Committee Airbel Impact Lab and at the Parsons Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. His work has been supported by the Melamid Fellowship at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Fulbright Research Grant. 

Prior to academia, Connor worked in global human rights philanthropy. He holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of Ljubljana and a B.A. in International Relations from The College of William & Mary.

At GIDEST, Connor will continue his dissertation research, focusing on artifacts that take the recognizable form of identity documents, yet—in a variety of ways—function without the sustaining element of nation-state citizenship. His case studies include the passports that have been issued for decades by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Neue Slowenische Kunst arts collective, as well as documents like municipal ID cards and refugee IDs that pluralize, complicate, or subvert the imaginary of the nation-state as the sole basis for political identity documentation. 

During his GIDEST year, Connor will primarily undertake archival work, interviewing, and secondary research about the Haudenosaunee Passport. Grounded in the contextual histories and claims involved in each case study document, his overall project then aims to problematize the complex and contingent linkages among bodies, devices, and political subjectivities that are otherwise treated as natural or pre-political by the dominant practices of documenting political identity. 

Drawing from concepts in critical border, mobility, citizenship, and design studies, Connor’s research asks: how have these alternative processes of documentation taken shape, in both contemporary and historical terms? What kinds of hybrid or paradoxical political statuses do the resulting documents produce when in circulation alongside nation-state documents and identification infrastructures? And what possibilities do they indicate for how political and mobility rights could be formulated otherwise in our contemporary world?