Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Changing Documentation Practices

该奖项支持的研究调查了不断变化的文件实践如何塑造人们对国家治理，法律的权威和公民身份的想法。普通证件，如驾驶执照和身份证，在现代公民的生活中至关重要。然而，世界各地的政府经常进行改革，创造新的文件，改变或消除旧的文件。 以往的研究多从改革的功能性角度进行评估，但较少关注改革的重复性对国家与公民关系的影响。填补这一空白很重要，因为以改进技术或精简官僚机构为目标的变革可能会产生意想不到的负面后果，如果在做出变革之前更好地了解这些后果，就可以避免这些后果。这项研究将由芝加哥大学人类学博士生Do Dom Kim在Julie Y.楚研究人员将该项目定位在中国深圳，那里的文件改革频繁发生，城市重建和即将到来的大规模搬迁使得文件实践的风险很高。文档的重要性的提高将使分析对象更容易隔离以用于研究目的，而不是在文档不丰富和以文档为中心的环境中。 研究人员将收集关于人们如何面临关键的生活决定，如驱逐，就业，婚姻和计划生育，在这个迅速变化的政治，法律的和技术环境中动员文件的数据。他们将采用民族志方法的组合，包括访谈，政策文件的话语分析和档案研究。 研究结果将有助于国家与公民关系、国内流离失所和社会主义法律的学术研究。此外，研究结果将分享给有关政策制定者，以了解人们如何适应文件改革以及不断政策变化的长期社会文化后果，特别是在移民和城市再开发的背景下。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.