Against Innocence

Miriam Ticktin's Against Innocence investigates how the widely valorized concept of innocence functions across migration, science, environmentalism, race, and reproductive politics to create exclusions and sustain racial capitalism.

She argues that innocence centers individual victims and saviors, erases collective histories and responsibilities, and justifies interventions and inequalities.

The book traces visual and discursive practices that produce innocence (for example, images of refugee children and claims about the fetus) and shows how such grammars both humanize some and dehumanize others.

Moving beyond critique, Ticktin documents existing practices of 'commoning'—collective regimes of living that refuse individualist victimhood—and speculates on alternative moral grammars and political imaginaries.

The work blends ethnographic sensibility, political theory, and aesthetics to propose ways of undoing innocence's hold and remaking social and moral worlds.