This talk explores the contradictions of transparency, as a concept, practice, and aesthetic within the public sphere. Drawing on insights from her recently published monograph, Nath offers a vision of document transparency located in social history, American militarism, and formations of power and difference. In this talk, Nath traces the Cold War rhetoric that inspired the 1966 Freedom of Information Act through the contested world of transparency activism. By drawing on wide-ranging examples from antiracist organizing, environmental initiatives, investigative journalism, and document diplomacy, she offers a portrait of transparency as both an inscription of and challenge to power.

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism and the archives of state violence. Her book A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War (Duke University Press, 2025), is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper.