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What do case files do? With help of an ethnographic study on the care, maintenance, and use of legal case files in a Dutch, inquisitorial context, we work through Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law. We understand these case files as enacting and performing both self‐reference and other‐reference. We coin the term border object to denote the way the legal case file becomes the nexus between two worlds it itself performatively produces: the world of ‘law itself’ on the one hand, and the ‘world out there’ on the other. As such, our discussion offers clues for a partial reconciliation of Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law: while Luhmann's insistence on other‐referential operations assist in showing how law forges an ‘epistemic relationship’ with the realities it seeks to judge, Latour's concentration on the materialities of epistemic practices assists in situating these other‐referential and self‐referential operations.

In this contribution, we zoom in on a shape-shifting object: race. We seek to demonstrate how an actor network-theoretical, non-dualistic sensitivity to concrete practices has diffracted the study of race in politically and ontologically fruitful ways by raising new questions, shedding light on ill-understood practices, and opening up the possibility of finding a language with which to do justice to novel configurations of race. As such, ANT has been instrumental in attending to race as a relational and multiple object, and in doing so has challenged us to rethink its status as either a 'fact' or a 'fiction', or as a matter of 'nature' or a matter of 'culture'. However, we not only pay attention to what ANT can do to 'race', we also want to attend to the question what 'race' does to ANT. As a shape-shifting object, race challenges certain ANT habits of thought, that is its emphasis on presence, and secondly, its emphasis on the present. With race, we are forced to think not only presence but also absence; and with race, we are required to attend not only to the here-and-now, but also to multiple histories, presents, and possible futures. 1 Something Ghostly Let us start right we were always already are: in the middle of things. Let us start, then, with a snapshot (see figure 1). It is a snapshot of an unknown suspect, released on the 9 th of January, 2015, by the Columbia SC Police Department. It shows the face of an individual whose DNA was found at a crime scene. On the basis of this DNA, Parabon NanoLabs, a commercial company, had produced a DNA-photofit: an image of what the perpetrator would look like. Striking is the suspect's face, which is presented here in different shades (dark and light) and from different angles in a mug-shot like fashion. This face draws us in and almost distracts our attention from other crucial information provided by the snapshot. Below the three faces, the image further details the information drawn from the DNA at the crime scene, such as geographical ancestry, skin, hair and eye colour as well as the absence of freckles. Categories are explicated by bars indicating colours or a map of the world marking places of origin.

Indifference has long been acknowledged as a crucial affect to the continuation of bureaucratic practices. Recently, the production of more diverse and layered affective modes in bureaucratic institutions is increasingly highlighted. However, how affects differ within and between sites saturated with ‘paper work’ remains an understudied terrain. In this paper we focus on the relations that are formed in daily file-work within two state institutions: a Deportation Unit and a Criminal Court. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to show that a) affects are locally produced in the relations that are mobilized in file-work b) these affects are unevenly produced within and between different bureaucratic practices. By comparing two different bureaucratic settings yet related in the subjugation they demand of the bureaucratic referent of their practices, we aim to put forward how differences in bureaucratic practice come with their own specific affective modes, showing that bureaucratic practices are saturated in, and thrive on, diverse affects of varying intensity. Bureaucratic action is a deeply affective practice, within which the relationship between caseworker, casefile, and the file’s referent is carefully calibrated. With this intervention we position ourselves within scholarship that complicates perceived dichotomies between rationality, still often associated with bureaucracy, and affect. Developing sensitivities towards such variety of bureaucratic affect offers nuanced perspectives on file-work and what kind of sovereign power the relations that are made through file-work subsequently allow to be reproduced.

In this contribution, I trace the ways practicing judges articulate, as well as challenge, race. Drawing on an ethnography of everyday practices of adjudication and sentencing in a Dutch, lower Criminal Court, and working with Stuart Hall's conception of articulation, I show how judges draw on three articulations of race -that of culture, the social milieu, and the phenotype -to make sense of individual cases. Emphasizing how and where these articulations of race serve local, pragmatic goals -of individualized sentencing, or of identification of the suspect -I also pay attention to their local impracticalities, that is, where these registers are challenged or resisted. In so doing, I do not only understand race as multiple but also situate race as a pragmatic and local accomplishment with its own uses and instabilities.