Introduction

We are all familiar with passports, but what can a sociological analysis tell us about these everyday objects? This free course, Passports: identity and airports, explores how the passport became a commonplace item and how material objects, such as the passport, have come to mediate modern air travel. Passports may seem like unremarkable everyday objects, but they’ve played a crucial, and often surprising, historical role in shaping the relationship between individuals and the social worlds in which they live. One place where we use a passport is at the airport, which we’ll explore as a case study later in this course.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD308 Making social worlds .