STS 262
Paper Trails Fall 2024
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed SOC 262 / GBST 262

Long before the invention of the passport, states or state-like entities sought to document and manage populations and discipline bodies. This course invites students to critically reflect on documentation practices and systemic violence, particularly against racial, ethnic, sexual, and political minorities. Students will explore identity-making through documentary practices such as the three-generation life history, a biographical form that Soviet-allied countries used to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Labels, such as a criminal record or pre-existing health conditions, also trail or precede individuals their whole lives. Students will grapple with what happens when the paper trail goes cold–when identification documents are invalidated, birth certificates withheld, household registries purged, and archives destroyed. Students will explore the rise of surveillance and biometric data alongside the actors, technologies, and industries that try to circumvent them in places such as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and along the US-Mexico border. In this project-based course, students will exhume paper trails and imagine alternative ways to create, alter, and subvert them.