Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Changing Documentation Practices

这项由该奖项支持的研究调查了不断变化的文件做法如何塑造人们对国家治理、法律权威和公民身份的想法。普通证件，如驾照和身份证，在现代公民的生活中可能至关重要。然而，世界各地的政府都会定期进行改革，创建新文件，修改或删除旧文件。以前的研究评估了改革的功能性，但对改革的重复性如何影响国家与公民关系的关注较少。填补这一空白很重要，因为为了改进技术或精简官僚机构而进行的改革可能会产生意想不到的负面后果，如果在做出改变之前更好地了解这些后果，这些后果是可以避免的。这项研究将由芝加哥大学人类学博士生Do Dom Kim进行，朱莉·Y·朱博士负责监督。研究人员将这个项目设在深圳中国，那里的文件改革一直在频繁进行，城市重建和即将到来的大规模搬迁使得文件做法的风险很高。文件的这种高度重要性将使分析对象更容易被分离出来用于研究目的，而不是在文件不那么丰富和以文件为中心的环境中。研究人员将收集有关面临关键生活决策的人的数据，如驱逐、就业、婚姻和计划生育，在这个快速变化的政治、法律和技术环境中如何动员文件。他们将结合使用人种学方法，包括访谈、政策文件的话语分析和档案研究。这项研究的发现将有助于研究国家与公民关系、国内流离失所和社会主义法律。此外，调查结果将与有关政策制定者分享，以了解人们如何适应文件改革以及持续政策变化的长期社会文化后果，特别是在移民和城市重建的背景下。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.