Birth Certs Map/Plot v2

Birth Certs Map/Plot v1

Here is a start on our map/plot/timeline.

For v2 and beyond see the collaborative Prezi.

Research Questions for Birth Certs Project

Research questions we generated:


1. What are we trying to explain?
  A: The 'stabilization' of the birth certificate.

2a. What counts as stabilization or emergence for us?  What counts as novelty?

2b. What is our endpoint?  What is the historical moment at which something stabilized in a form that still resonates for us and/or is used or continues to function?
  Tentative Answer: 1936???

2c. What are the paradigmatic features of the birth certificate for us today?  Functional paradigms.  Design paradigms.

3. What categories of analysis do we want to bring to the project?  Pearson is focused on 'shift in epistemological authority'.  What is our focus?

4. What dimensions or aspects of birth certs. are we interested in?

• Pragmatic functions in culture, society, law (Pearson)
• Pragmatic functions in medicine
• Materiality
• Design and format
• Moral authority
• Administrative practice

5. What are vectors/factors for the stabilization of the birth certificate?

• See Sarah's timeline (prezi collab) & descriptive doc of timeline (in g drive)

6. Other figures to track beyond 'reformers' and 'child laborers' ('the unregistered baby')?

7. What different justifications are being used by actors to argue for the birth certificate?  Do the arguments actually even matter?  Is that what makes a difference?  Who did they convince?

8. What accounts for the uptake or "conditions of acceptance of birth certs."?

9. What birth cert. form categories are "excessive" or beyond biopolitics?  What questions cannot be statisticalized?  (Name.)
  - There is a space between using birth certificates for public health or census purposes and the legal uses of birth certs..
  - What technologies preceded each of these uses?  What technologies preceded public health stats?  And what technologies preceded legal uses?

10. When do birth certs. become so stable (so 'sealed up') that people can begin to worry about their privacy/confidentiality?  What form does that worry/concern/problem take?  How specifically do birth certificates 'problematize' privacy historically?

  - See Model Law 1977 rev. (why did they wait almost 30 years from initial recognition of issues?)
  - See Children's Bureau 1949 pamphlet on the confidentiality of birth records
  - Howard and Hemenway 1931 article mentions privacy & confidentiality (but w/o the words)
  - Can we find anything prior to 1949 on confidentiality of birth records?

11. Issues of federal- versus state-level administration of birth certificates.  How did a state-run technology (or series of 48 state-level technologies) become a de facto national standard?

--

12. How do we distinguish between mediators or switch points and actors that just so happen to be participant in multiple networks or vectors?  Why is the model law a mediator, but the children's bureau is working in two networks? 

Working Docs for Birth Certs Project

Here we will keep a list of some of our working docs.

• Bibliography of Original Sources and Commentaries (see the group's google drive)
• Timeline (see Collaborative Prezi)
• ???

Initial Topic Surveys

We will post here 'points of entry' for the three topics listed below.

Each of us should post at least one contemporary source (preferably a history of some aspect of the topic published in the last two decades) and one original source (that is itself internal to the topic and preferably from the 1950s or earlier, ideally 1910s-1930s, but of course that depends on the topic -- this source can be as simple as an image as a document, or a statute, or an essay by a proponent, etc.).  Please post links to original articles.  If that's not easy to do (b/c the article is behind a paywall), post a citation, plus if you can save/make a PDF and send it around the email distribution list (though I realize this will create a chunk of clutter in each of our inboxes).


consumer credit reporting

birth certificates

travel visas

CGC Fall 2016 Schedule

Our plan for the Fall 2016 term is a collaborative workshop on documentary identification.

Thur Sept 29 - initial meeting, read "Introduction" to Breckenridge & Szreter (eds.), Registration and Recognition...

Thur Oct 6 - Initial exploration of three possible topic areas: consumer credit reporting, birth certificates, travel visas, read James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, section on legal names


Thur Oct 13 - Attend Mark Kelly talk at 4:00 (note time) in Deady Hall (see Philosophy Dept events page for details) and/or additional seminar on Wed Oct 12 at 5:30 in SCH 250C

Tues Oct 18 - Three tasks each:

  1. read a contemporary source (Pearson, "Age Ought to be a Fact"

  2. follow a contemporary resource's footnotes 2 hops deep (and add it to the biblio doc)

  3. one of the following (and if you start one of these post a link to the blog):

•   find original resources (esp. periodicals from groups driving birth cert. stdndztn., or groups resisting)
•   find first-generation (or early years) birth certificate images (either state docs, or national docs)
•   timelines (use a prezi, include footnotes; zotero; Sarah will start this)
•   make a compendium of terms that would guide or research

Thur Oct 27 - Four tasks each...
 

  1. Each of us will familiarize ourselves with Sarah's initial prezi timeline (see the F16 Compendium doc in the G Drive)

  2. Keep maintaining bibliography -- upload docs you have and mark uploaded docs with a * (see bibliography doc for notes)

  3. Read 1 or 2 original sources each and add abstracts (two sentences or so) to the bibliography doc. See the Plecker entry for a sample abstract by Colin. We self-assigned the following to ourselves.

• Colin: Child Health Bulletin survey (or other)
  
• Bonnie: Cressy Wilbur
• Patrick: Grace Ward 
• Claire: R. Lenhart, "Completeness..."
• Paul: Manger, "Cooperation of State and Fed'l..."
• Sarah: Hemenway (or other)
• Laura: xxx 

  4. Read Dominique Marshall 2012 piece: "Birth Registration and the Promotion of Children’s Rights in the Interwar Years" (from the Breckenridge/Szreter volume from which we read the "Introduction")


Thur Nov 3 - [Meet 7:00 at Colin's House]

Read work and begin research on the following...

• Laura: Laws (fed'l statutes; and also state statutes for
• Bonnie: Census Bureau Model Law
• Colin: Census Bureau Birth Registration Area
• Paul: Rockefeller Foundation, ancillary agencies (cf. Marshall, p. 460)
• Sarah: Children's Bureau v. Farming and Agriculture (to have control over resources)
• Sarah: Am Med Association v. Children's Bureau (w/ regards to preventive healthcare vs. state medicine)
• Claire: ?Children's Bureau, 1912-1918 Birth Reg Campaign (cf. Marshall, p. 460)
• Patrick: ?Children's Bureau, 1924-? Committee for Completion of Birth Regst'n Area by 1930 (cf. Marshall, p. 460)

Thur Nov 10 - We will each conduct/continue research into the following areas for the next 3 meetings, and we will do so with an eye to two categories of analysis:

  [1] Stabilization - when do birth certs. stabilize?, e.g., when do they become easily usable by other technologies, forms,, practices?
  [2] Justifications or rationales given for birth registration (i.e., the '3 justifications' of demographic, sanitary, and legal reasons laid out in the Census 1908 pamphlet on "Legal Importance", p. 7) - which of these reasons takes priority and how? how are they separate/separable in the practices we are studying? do some map to biopolitics and others not?




Topic areas will be the following:

• Claire: Immunization, follow the trail of the American Medical Association
• Paul: The transition from the Children's Bureau to Census Bureau as spearheading the birth registration campaign.
• Patrick: private actor involvement in birth registration (e.g., insurance companies like Metropolitan Life and 'ngo'-style actors).
• Colin: continued research on Census Bureau actors (esp. Wm. H Davis) + additional research on American Public Health Association
• Bonnie: Track development of model law (legal dimension), esp. state statutes and regulations.
• Laura: (?) case law and court decisions (coordinate with Bonnie on state statutes)
• Sarah: (?) controversies such as Children's Bureau v. Farming and Agriculture (to have control over resources) or Am Med Association v. Children's Bureau (w/ regards to preventive healthcare vs. state medicine)

Thur Nov 17 -
continue research from last wee

Thur Nov 24 - [Thanksgiving Holiday - reschedule for Tuesday? - or take a by week?]
[no meeting]

Thur Dec  1 -
Four tasks each between Nov 17 and Dec 1:

* Continue to read from our own respective cases

* Read notes on Foucault's category of 'the switch point' from Wtr 2016 (sent around by Colin via email)

* Read selections from Foucault's 'Punitive Society' and 'Abnormal' referenced in the notes -- there aren't many pages actually referenced here so just read around.

* Experimentally write 300-500 words on how some aspect of the birth registration system (std form, model law, b.r.a. or something else) functions as a switch point in each of our cases* Continue to think about the way to frame this as an article in a current debate


Thur Dec 8 -
plan tbd

CGC 2016-17 Plan

A quick update with more details to follow later...

We'll begin next year in Fall & Winter term by undertaking a collaboratory project on the genealogy of 'documentary identification,' 'identification technologies,' and related practices.  The range of objects of inquiry include vital registration (birth certificates),

state identification (social security cards and numbers), technologies of identification (the legal name), and other aspects of individual informational accoutrement (medical dossiers, education transcripts, curricula vitae, perhaps even more recent technologies like social media profiles).

We'll meet in week 1 of Fall term to decide on one of the following plans of inquiry:

• Pick a single technology as a collaboratory that we all focus on as a group (with readings each week on that technology) -- maybe even try to co-author something in Winter term on this
• Each pick individual technologies of interest to us and create different individual reading plans so that each week we come to the collaboratory ready to share insights and findings on the genealogy of that technology (this could also be done in small groups)
• Some other plan?

In the meantime, enjoy summer, and may it be productive.