What can we learn from the unmaking of documents?
Documents and the routes they follow constitute the fabric of organisational life. As such, various social and political values are associated with the disposition of administrative files.
In some cases, destroying records is understood as corruption or cover-up. In others it safeguards privacy, or signifies probity in records management.
Through historical and contemporary case studies, this research project explores the contextual and contradictory ideals around the shredding, burning or otherwise rendering illegible of files. The project is under contract at MIT Press as a book, provisionally titled Destruction of Documents.