BMET 27A21 - The Utopia of Rules: Gender, Migration and Bureaucracy

What does bureaucracy do to people who move. How do forms and files become narratives.

This seminar reads administrative language as literature and migration archives as emotional landscapes. We move between anthropology, feminist theory, and visual culture to explore what happens when human experience meets paper, law, and code.

Inspired by David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, we see bureaucracy not only as absurd and violent but also as strangely intimate. It is a system that organizes hope, fear, and belonging. We’ll read asylum claims and visa forms as cultural artifacts, and we’ll question how categories like gender and citizenship are performed through them. Students will engage in case studies, testimonies, and artistic works that document migration from within: bureaucracy as theater, and paperwork as performance.

Academic expectations

Participation is key. Each week, students bring one text, object, or short quote that resonates with the theme. The goal is to read institutions as we would read novels – slowly, critically, with attention to tone and silence. There will be one in-class presentation, one written reflection (1-2 pages, freeform), and a final project: a creative and analytical response to a real bureaucratic artifact – a form, a letter, a refusal, or a file.

Grades reward precision and originality rather than technical jargon.