Bureaucracy

Subtitle
A Love Story

Bureaucracy usually only becomes visible when it stops working — when a system fails, when an event gets off schedule, when someone points to a problem or glitch in a carefully calibrated workflow. But "Bureaucracy: A Love Story" draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains. People have navigated bureaucracy for centuries, by creating and utilizing various literary and rhetorical forms — from indexes to alphabetization to diagrams to blanks — that made it possible to efficiently process large amounts of information. Contemporary bureaucracy is likewise concerned with how to collect and store information, to circulate it efficiently, and to allow for easy access. We are interested both in the conventional definition of bureaucracy as a form of ordering and control connected to institutions and the state, but we also want to uncover how people interacted — often in creative ways — with the material forms of bureaucracy.

Bio

Ryan Skinnell, who earned a PhD in English in 2011 at Arizona State University, is assistant professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.


Cover of Bureaucracy: A Love Story edited by Gabriel Cervantes, Dahlia Porter, Ryan Skinnell, and Kelly Wisecup
Date published
Publisher
Aquiline Books / University of North Texas Libraries
ISBN
978-1-68040-031-1

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