## Notes from 18 May 2025 [[2025-05-17|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-05-19|Next note →]] Today, I came across a newsletter called [Bureaucritics](https://bureaucritics.substack.com/), which explores cultural forms that engage with offices, paperwork and public administration. Edited by Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster, the newsletter is published quarterly and features research, events, and publications on "[[Speculative Bureaucracies and Administrative Futurism|bureaucratic fiction]]". Irimia, a Humboldt Fellow, leads a project titled "[Bureaucratic Fiction: Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (B-FILES)](https://www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/bureaucratic-fiction). From 2024 to 2026, the project will examine how contemporary fiction and cinema reflect and shape bureaucratic structures and imaginaries. Drawing on narratology, image theory, and affect studies, the project analyzes how administrative processes inform aesthetic forms and how these forms influence public perception and memory. Foster, who recently [completed his Ph.D. at Stockholm University](https://www.su.se/department-of-english/news/jonathan-foster-successfully-defends-his-thesis-1.815175), specializes in British literature of the long nineteenth century. His dissertation examines how authors such as Dickens, Martineau, and Woolf portrayed officialdom and used narrative to intervene in political debates and reflect the textual nature of modern bureaucracy. The newsletter also connects to broader projects, such as [Imaginart](https://imaginart.site/), which studies how artists respond to institutional failure through small-scale, collective experiments. Funded by the Dutch Research Council, this project examines artistic practices in contexts such as South Africa, Indonesia and Palestine, where cultural work becomes a tool for rethinking state forms. Together, these efforts suggest that the relationship between bureaucracy and culture is more dynamic than it seems at first glance. Fiction, film and art do more than mirror administrative realities; they help produce and transform them. Bureaucritics collects and circulates examples of this interaction, facilitating discussions that are often overlooked in more traditional academic settings. There is something methodical and precise about its approach, yet it is also open to experimentation. Without overstating its purpose, Bureaucritics offers a growing archive for those interested in how administration enters the imagination - and how imagination, in turn, enters administration.