Socioplastics 11807 Before the Rejection Letter
Institutions shape evidence through the formats they permit people to submit. A housing assistance portal may require a fixed address, standard documents and a limited set of household categories. A person whose situation crosses those categories can be excluded before an official assesses the claim. FormatAdmission examines this threshold: the passage through which lived conditions become representable within an institutional procedure. Michel Foucault’s work on knowledge and institutional practice, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s studies of classification, and Achille Mbembe’s writing on archives and power illuminate different stages of that passage. A format organises what can be recorded, compared and acted upon. Its technical design therefore has consequences for administrative recognition, and those consequences can be studied through the cases that arrive, fail to arrive or require translation by staff. A research protocol could compare accepted applications with incomplete submissions, support requests and cases redirected to another service. It would record which fields applicants could not complete, what evidence staff accepted as a substitute and how categories shaped the outcome. Interviews with applicants and administrators could clarify how the format worked in practice. Findings could guide revisions to the form, alternative submission routes and a record of claims the current system cannot yet receive. FormatAdmission focuses attention on the beginning of institutional evaluation. It helps assess evidence by examining the conditions under which a case becomes visible to a procedure. A form can remain efficient while adding routes for complex situations, and a documented review can show whether those routes improve recognition and access.
REFERENCES
Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
Mbembe, A. (2002) ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Hamilton, C. et al. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 19–26.
Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377–391.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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