Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Changing Documentation Practices

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award investigates how changing documentation practices shape people's ideas about state governance, legal authority, and citizenship. Ordinary documents, such as driver's licenses and ID cards, can be critically important in the lives of modern citizens. However, governments everywhere regularly undertake reforms that create new documents and alter or eliminate old ones. Previous research has assessed the functionality of reforms, but less attention has been paid to how the very repetitiveness of reforms affects the state-citizen relationship. Filling this gap is important because changes made with the goal of improving technologies or streamlining bureaucracies may have unintended, negative consequences that could be avoided if they were better understood before the changes were made. The research will be conducted by University of Chicago anthropology doctoral student, Do Dom Kim, with the oversight of Dr. Julie Y. Chu. The researchers have sited the project in Shenzhen, China, where documentation reforms have been occurring frequently and urban redevelopment and impending mass relocation have made the stakes of documentation practices high. This heightened importance of documentation will make the object of analysis easier to isolate for research purposes than in might be in a less documentation-rich and documentation-centric environment. The researchers will collect data on how people facing critical life decisions such as eviction, employment, marriage, and family planning, mobilize documentation in this quickly changing political, legal, and technological environment. They will employ a combination of ethnographic methodologies including interviews, discourse analysis of policy documents, and archival research. Findings from the research will contribute to scholarship on the state-citizen relationship, internal displacement, and socialist law. In addition, findings will be shared policymakers concerned to understand how people adapt to documentation reforms as well as the long-term sociocultural consequences of constant policy changes, particularly in the context of migration and urban redevelopment. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.