Seeing with Paper: Government Documents and Material Participation

Government documents such as welfare applications or accounting records are often considered mundane artifacts that signify shared practice and routine. In this paper we examine cases where these "everyday documents" are sites of creation and contestation of the dominant information order. We argue that the circulation of everyday government documents opens up the possibility for a population to gaze back and "see" the state. In three cases, we show how the materiality of everyday documents in welfare schemes takes center-stage in mediating public participation in India and in the US.