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Documenting Uncertainty : = Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Documenting Uncertainty :/
Reminder of title:	Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China.
Author:	Kim, Do Dom.
Description:	1 online resource (318 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-02, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-02A.
Subject:	Cultural anthropology. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798841791911

Documenting Uncertainty : = Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China.
Kim, Do Dom.

Documenting Uncertainty :Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China. - 1 online resource (318 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-02, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2022.

Includes bibliographical references

Documenting Uncertainty is an ethnography of urban migrants' documentation practices and their narratives of mobility and belonging in the People's Republic of China. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shenzhen, this dissertation examines how people at crossroads in their lives-such as migrant tenants threatened by an impending eviction, a prospective retiree, and young college graduates mulling over their career options-speak of and interact with government-issued "proof papers" (zhengjian) like IDs, certificates, permits, and registers. By tracing the intersections and disjunctures across their narrated lived experiences, legal claims, and popular discourses about documents, these chapters highlight the hopes, desires, and anxieties that compel migrants to engage extensively in documentation practices, even when legal documents undermine their claims of belonging.Since China's expansion of a market economy in the 1980s, proof papers have proliferated as authoritative and transparent evidence that reproduced the increasingly mobile masses as legible and productive citizens. Contrary to the intended evidentiary function of such documents, my dissertation captures numerous moments in which they generate uncertainties instead of conclusive truths. For example, conflicting claims emerge from the heterogeneous authorships that are involved in the material assembly of legal documents (e.g., multiple issuing authorities, intermediaries, documented individuals who exercise curatorial authority, etc.). Likewise, people make diverse interpretations of the documents through the extrajudicial knowledge that they have gained from unofficial spheres (e.g., personal networks, rumor mills, the heavily censored media, etc.). I argue that such moments of uncertainty critically constitute the compelling force of legal documents in urban China. Uncertainty represents the suspension of the law's authority. This suspension, in turn, enables migrants to communicate understandings of belonging, urban citizenship, and social justice alternative to the law's prescriptions. Moreover, they can do so without forfeiting the rational language of the bureaucracy and the law that documents represent, which helps thwart to some degrees the censorship apparatus. Under these circumstances, the curating of documents emerges as an effective strategy for migrants to preempt undesirable uncertainties and challenge the law's arbitrary exclusion of them. Yet uncertainty in legal narratives calls for a decisive closure regarding whose accounts and which evidence should persevere. Due to the unavailability of an alternative source of rational authority, migrants eventually seek exceptional interventions from the law-the very source of the justification in for denying their belonging to the city. By illuminating this irony, this dissertation articulates the reproduction of the law's authority in urban China through the desires and anxieties that drive the mundane practices of documentation. In doing so, it moves away from the spectacles of sensationally harsh and authoritarian oppression conventionally represented by "the law" in documentation regimes.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798841791911Subjects--Topical Terms:

1179959
Cultural anthropology.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Documentation practiceIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Documenting Uncertainty : = Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China.
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653 $a Media
653 $a Migration
653 $a Shenzhen
653 $a Urban citizenship
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