lectures

Changing the record: how people use(d) paperwork to make their world

Birkbeck

May 19

Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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This roundtable brings together scholars, activists, and archivists to think about the way people navigate bureaucracies and paperwork to shape their world. We are living and have been living for a while in a world where the record holds power over our realities, and where structures of power are replicated through paperwork, risking to stifle or destroy individuals and communities. Rather than focus on that burden, this roundtable flips the script and asks how those who are on the margins recognise the power of paperwork and deliberately keep paper trails to protect their truths and existence and change their situation through it. Trade unions which create shadow archives exposing employers' policy breaches and holding them to account; employees submitting grievances to make their experiences part of the official record; activists seeking to set precedents in court to change the implementation of the law; refugee charities helping people to navigate the bureaucracy through creating the right papertrail for them as well as changing policy; decolonising nations setting the terms of their citizens' passports in international contexts; marginalised communities recording their own histories to counter exclusion as victim or villain; etc.

Across generations, people have deliberately used and engaged playfully with the paperwork which had been imposed upon them. Through preserving and generating their record, individuals and communities have shaped how they are treated, how their rights are enacted, or how they're changed. This is grounded in garnering knowledge, and using that knowledge to shape the world around you. This roundtable invites discussion of these tactics across various fields and time periods.