Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

Brookes, Barbara; Dunk, James

doi:10.1080/13642529.2018.1489578

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…Clearly in serving one's country, rights to privacy get lost whereas in the psychiatric archive, the stigma of mental illness is imagined to continue after death. (Brookes and Dunk, 2018: 286)…”

Section: Methods and Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history

Glew

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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Paperwork plays a key role in a how institutions accommodate, refuse, or manage disabled people. This article develops modes for reading paperwork that build on each other, beginning with (a) recognizing the institutional pressures at work in shaping bureaucratic practices, then (b) considering how a person's relationship to disability influences how they might encounter these practices, and ultimately (c) noticing how the encounter between disabled/mad people and an institution might create something new, what the author calls archival excess. These methods for reading are in conversation with disability studies, medical humanities, and document studies, and ultimately work toward a goal adapted from the principles of Disability Justice: recognizing the wholeness of disabled subjects in institutional archives.

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Section: Methods and Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history

Glew

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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“…A history of the CV must investigate not only the usage of short life narratives that are specifically formatted to attain positions, promotions, or pensions in state bureaucracies, but also the means by which such narratives are materialized and mediated. Such a genealogy must inevitably revolve around the role of documents as constructive entities of bureaucratic organizations (Hull 2012;Gitelman 2014;Brookes and Dunk 2018). Documents in administrations operate as 'genres of organizational communication' (Yates and Orlikowski 1992), or, more precisely, 'organizational records' (Foscarini 2015).…”

Section: Theoretical and Methodological Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizing careers for work – The curriculum vitae (CV) in Prussia’s technical bureaucracy, c. 1770-1830

Strunz

2020

Management & Organizational History

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This paper explores the history of the curriculum vitae (CV) as a medium of job application in the Prussian technical bureaucracy around 1800. A document that so far has not received much attention in historiographical works, appeared as a major tool for bureaucratic innovation at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on primary archival sources, this paper will raise three major points. First, the curriculum vitae facilitated the depiction of 'careers': linear sequences of professional formation pointing toward certain positions. It helped applicants stylize their education and employment history as a time of continuous progress and merit, i.e. a veritable career. Second, the CV enabled the organization and control of personnel in a large-scale administrative body. Administrators used the CV as a tool to familiarize themselves with unknown persons and place them to positions according to their past professional trajectory. Finally, the lives recounted in CVs did not correspond to the contemporary concept of self-reflexive Bildung but were embedded in a utilitarian discourse of usefulness. In this vein, only those biographical events mattered for a CV that were useful for the state and pertained to the professional formation of the subject.

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“…Specifically related to the asylum world was the paper by Andrews (1998), which emphasized the importance of case notes for historians of psychiatry. A special issue of Rethinking History , moreover, provided new interesting material connecting bureaucracy to the production of knowledge (Brookes and Dunk, 2018). In particular, contributing authors studied the origins, scope and circulation of asylum records in national and transnational settings (Brookes, 2018; Dunk, 2018; Hess, 2018; Moran, 2018; Swartz, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The paper technology of confinement: evolving criteria in admission forms (1850–73)

Sposini

2021

Hist Psychiatry

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This paper investigates the role of admission forms in the regulation of asylum confinement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taking the Toronto Lunatic Asylum as a case study it traces the evolution of the forms’ content and structure during the first decades of this institution. Admission forms provide important material for understanding the medico-legal assessment of lunacy in a certain jurisdiction. First, they show how the description of insanity depended on a plurality of actors. Second, doctors were not necessarily required to indicate symptoms of derangement. Third, patients’ relatives played a fundamental role in providing clinical information. From an historiographical perspective, this paper invites scholars to consider the function of standardized documents in shaping the written identity of patients.

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Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history

Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history

Organizing careers for work – The curriculum vitae (CV) in Prussia’s technical bureaucracy, c. 1770-1830

The paper technology of confinement: evolving criteria in admission forms (1850–73)

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