The aim of this article is to draw upon sacred/secular ‘journeying’ to explore the inherent movement invoked by the state’s documentation of the life course. In tracing this motion, the article follows two intersecting pathways – the literal travel of those who register a life event and the figurative ‘journeying’ of legal identity. The argument develops from a case study conducted at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge (Canterbury, UK): a museum, gallery, library, cafe, community exhibition, tourist information point and registration hub. But rather than using the building as a frame, to follow more closely the activity of registrars and citizens, I locate imaginative potential in the Beaney’s ‘tessellating’ spaces. Accordingly, the spatial account which is developed is ‘fictive’ in its very nature and offers an implicit critique of a bureaucratic act of governance embedded with legal fiction. In doing so, the article contributes to critical work on registration which deploys the language of ‘journeying’ to outline the performative force of state documentation, and more broadly, to spatial approaches which illustrate patterns of movement within the ‘lawscape’. The article argues that the ‘journeying’ of registration represents a pilgrimage, whereby individuals are ‘called’ to bureaucratic space at the centre of their local sphere, and the certificates they take with them, much like the badges of medieval pilgrims, are ‘takeaway tokens’ of the state – documents which impress legal identities upon us.
Arising from the spatial turn in the social sciences, metaphors and material practices of movement have developed into methodological tools for studying the transitory moments of everyday life. This article explores how socio‐legal scholars can use movement as method to trace law in the everyday of civic space. The research draws upon a project that explored how bodies, materials, concepts, and administrative processes are set in motion in the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury, England, where births and deaths are registered on the mezzanine floor of the municipal library, museum, and art gallery. The article teases out some of the challenges of journeying with law, in architectural settings where legal activity has not been explicitly designed for, but where it nonetheless surfaces in fleeting moments. Movement as method, I argue, expands the socio‐legal toolkit for examining spaces of law and bureaucracy while challenging assumptions made in socio‐legal studies about the buildings typically inhabited by lawyers in the Global North.
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