II Provocation
Papers
A pass book and a household registration record cannot be equated — apartheid influx control and the Chinese hukou belong to different histories and different injustices. But both are documents that regulate internal movement, and both work on time: they determine not only where a person may be, but when — how long one may stay, how long one must wait for permission, how long a family lives apart.
Read side by side, they show the document as a time-device: a paper that holds a body still while the economy takes its labour. The classification systems behind such papers — the instruments, the categories, the files — are the machinery of administered waiting.
The question on the table
What does a document do to time? Bring one — a permit, a pass, a registration, a visa — and read its temporal fine print.
Ways in Information Science · History · Modern Foreign Languages · Sociology & Social Anthropology · Geography & Environmental Studies
Respond to this theme ±200 words on what you would bring · by Tuesday 8 September