I-dentity stories: An exploration of identification practices
and policies through everyday experience
Andrew Clement
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto
140 St George Street
Toronto ON M5S 3G6
+1 416-978-3111
andrew.clement@utoronto.ca
ABSTRACT
This proposal for a Wildcard Session at the iConference outlines
how why and how we will report stories of individual everyday
experiences with identity documentation as well as solicit
thematically related stories from session participants.
Keywords
Identity,
identification,
performances, policies.
stories,
documents,
practices,
1. INTRODUCTION
The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in attention to matters of
personal identification. This has been driven mainly by the
expansion of digital networking into many facets of everyday life
and by the raised security concerns linked to the ‘war on terror’
and identity theft. New technologies, systems and policies are
being actively developed by governments and businesses who
often promise better, faster, more secure forms of identification,
but this is happening largely without an adequate understanding of
what this means for the millions of identity subjects—ordinary
people—who will have to acquire and use these documents in the
course of their daily lives. “Improved” documents usually mean
documents with new technological features intended to address
perceived shortcomings or to expand functionality. However, as
our recent experience in Ontario demonstrates, where the
Legislature recently developed and passed a Bill to create new
“enhanced” driver’s licenses, the consequences of these
“improvements” may go beyond the intended benefits and
engender fundamental concerns about such issues as privacy,
surveillance, fraud and mobility rights. It is critical that we have
an adequate understanding of the way people use existing
documents and experience the practices and processes involved in
acquiring, using, losing, and replacing these documents, and an
appreciation for the serious personal and human rights concerns
implied by large-scale identification projects if we are to ‘get
them right’. Academic research in this area can offer little help
unless it is informed by empirical studies of identity and
identification practices from the perspective of individuals. The
research we have recently begun in the three year Performing
IDentities Project seeks to fill the academic and practical gaps in
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our understanding of how people perform and experience their
individual identities in their everyday encounters with
identification based services and technologies.
2. GOALS
The goals of this session are threefold. First, we would like to
share our research in a format and forum that permits both
explication and exploration of the key issues in identification
technologies and policies within the interdisciplinary, interactive
i-school conference setting. Second, we would like to use the
identity stories we have collected in our research as a means of
providing a vivid voice to issues that require a coherent and
informed response in this important policy area, while providing
space for session participants to contribute their own narratives of
lived experience to the discussion.
Finally, we want to
demonstrate a real gap in the current approach to identification
policy and practice. By highlighting and discussing one approach
towards bringing individual citizens’ real experiences and
challenges with current identification documents and processes
into prominence, we would like to stimulate a broader exploration
of alternative approaches, appropriate research methods, and
perceived need for such empirical work.
3. FORMAT
After a brief introduction to the topic of identification
documentation and practices and its importance as an area of
study in information and information systems policy arenas, we
propose to structure this wildcard session around a series of
identity stories that have been shared with us by research
participants (as well as some we researchers have experience our
selves). These brief narratives, chosen to represent the dominant
themes that are currently emerging in our ongoing exploratory
research, will describe participants’ personal experiences with the
processes of acquiring institutional identification documents, their
use of these documents in significant settings including,
particularly, at international borders, and the consequences of
losing and having to replace important ID documents. They will
reflect a range of possible identity performances, from ‘normal’
encounters, where things go relatively smoothly, to more
problematic ones, where identities are difficult to acquire, enact,
maintain, repair. These stories will be used to illustrate key points
that we believe are, or should be, central to making policies that
take identity subjects’ needs and rights into account, while also
providing a shared focal point for provoking a series of
discussions and debate on these same points as they are raised in
an iterative cycle of storytelling, context-setting, and reflection.
Following the reporting on each theme, we’ll ask workshop
participants to note incidents from their own lives that resonate
with the stories presented. After we have introduced all three
major themes, we’ll ask workshop participants to write up and
document the most vivid of their own stories. These will be
shared with the group, and with permission, posted to our research
website (PerformingID.ca) as an enduring record of the workshop.
The workshop will end with a discussion of the research and
policy implications of this approach.
4. SCHEDULE
Here is a provisional schedule for a 90 min workshop:
Minutes
Topic
10
Welcome and attendee self-introductions
5
Overview of Performing ID research project
5
Theme 1 Stories (Acquiring ID)
5
5
5
5
5
Reflections
Theme 2 Stories (Crossing borders)
Reflections
Theme 3 Stories (Repairing impaired ID)
Reflections
15
Telling ones own ID story (individually or in
small groups)
10
Sharing our own ID stories
10
Policy implications
10
Further research
It is our hope that this approach will provide a concrete and
grounded starting point for a collaborative research encounter that
can cumulatively develop substantive insights into the issues of
identification practice and policy that affect us all.
5. PARTICIPANTS
Anyone interested in the topic of ID documents and performance
are welcome, especially those with interesting stories to tell about
their own experiences. For this format to be workable in the time
allowed, we request that the number of attendees be limited to 15.
6. ORGANIZERS
The session organizers are:
Dr. Andrew Clement, Professor, Faculty of Information,
University of Toronto
Dr. David Phillips, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information,
University of Toronto
Krista Boa, PhD Student, Faculty of Information, University of
Toronto
Joseph Ferenbok, PhD Student, Faculty of Information, University
of Toronto
Brenda McPhail, PhD Student, Faculty of Information, University
of Toronto