Stamp, Sign, Submit: Ethnographic Approaches to Bureaucracy
ANTHRO 1894
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
Bureaucracies are built of tangible things: forms to be filled out, records to be kept, emails to be archived, platforms to be navigated. This course guides students towards an understanding of bureaucracy by focusing on the paperwork and digital traces – from forms, reports and memoranda to identity papers, records, filing systems and business cards -- that bureaucracies produce. Drawing from ethnography, history and social theory, this course examines how paper and now digital artifacts – shape bureaucratic power. The aim of the class is two-fold: first, students will develop a conceptual and methodological toolkit to analyze bureaucracies and, second, students will apply this toolkit to a collaborative research project, which will unfold over the semester, on a TBD on-campus bureaucracy.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
