Cultural Bureaucracy Studies
Dear Bureaucritics,
2025 rushed to an end. But it’s been a year so rich in bureaucriticism, that we’re still busy covering it.
Given how many scholars, authors, and artists have been passionately exploring bureaucracy through a cultural and humanistic lens, we believe it’s time to connect this growing international community and create a Cultural Bureaucracy Studies Network—a shared space for dialogue and collaboration. It would help consolidate the momentum and bring visibility to this vibrant interdisciplinary field, fostering connections across borders, languages, and disciplines.
Which is why we’re opening this issue inviting ideas and collaborators to help shape this initiative — from potential institutional partners and funding strategies to the design of a website and communication platform. Drop us a note at bureaucritics@gmail.com if you have a specific idea about how you’d like to get involved.
That said, here’s what we discovered since our previous dispatch:
Virtual Museum
Thrillingly, the field of public administration has since 2025 a dedicated online museum, The Virtual Museum of Public Service, created by a team led by Marc Holzer (Rutgers University) and involved with the Public Voices Journal.
One of the exhibitions on display is Red Tape from Red Square: Artists vs. Bureaucracy, curated by Liudmila Kouznetsova, Vache Gabrielien, and Iryna Illiash. It features spectacular representations of bureaucracy by Soviet-era Russian cartoonists and poets.
SCHOLARSHIP
→ Books
Irish Writers in the Civil Service (Liverpool University Press, 2026)
Edited by Jonathan Foster and Elliott Mills
“Tracing the evolution of the figure of the writer-cum-bureaucrat from the Victorian Irish Civil Service through to the present day, this volume examines the scenes of literary art that developed behind counters and desks in bureaucratic Dublin and Belfast, as well as the international contexts in which Irish writers found administrative work in the diplomatic sphere. Advancing our sense of the shape and dynamics of these environments, the volume maps out literary networks spanning both local and central government institutions, thus shedding new light on the phenomenon of the literariness of Irish officialdom.”
With contributions from Paul Murray, Maria Luddy, Eileen Morgan-Zayacheck, Lucy Collins, Joseph LaBine and Tobias W. Harris, Andrew V. McFeaters, Síobhra Aiken, Jonathan Foster and Christina McCambridge, John O’Donnell, and Gerald Dawe.
This volume of essays edited by Edoardo Ongaro, Giovanni Orsina, and Lorenzo Castellani explores the contribution of the humanities to the study of public administration. Chapters discuss how artworks can be a source of knowledge and understanding for public servants, and propose strategies for connecting the humanities with public administration studies.
Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork (Chicago UP, 2024)
George Maciunas is usually introduced as the founder of Fluxus. He’s also often been cast as an artistic outsider. Was he even an artist? An organizer? A troublemaker with really good filing skills? In Fluxus Administration, Colby Chamberlain looks at Maciunas’s work through the lens of his paperwork. Across architecture, performance, publishing, graphic design, film, and even real estate, Maciunas used the tools of bureaucracy to build models of community.
To anyone interested in administration as aesthetics, paperwork as performance, and institutions as artistic material, this one promises to be a treat.
→ Special Issues
Amtschmenschen, Mittelweg, issue 36, vol. 3 and 4, Hamburger Edition, 2025.
This special issue of the Journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research brings together 10 insightful contributions on the subject of state functionaries and their cultural representations. It is available in Open Access.
→ Podcasts
Episode 12 of Radio Myles: the Flann O’Brien Podcast features a conversation with Elliott Mills titled Brian, Myles, and the Civil Service.
Mills talks about his work on the Irish late modernist writer Brian O’Nolan, who worked in the Irish civil service and wrote Kafkaesque novels such as The Third Policeman (1939) under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien.
FICTION
→ Literature
(novel) Theresia Töglhofer, Tatendrang, Residenz Verlag, 2024.
Tatendrang (German for Drive to Action) is the novel of a young generation that wants to make a united Europe its playground and in doing so becomes a pawn in questionable political strategies. Set in a fictional European institution in Brussels, the book describes how bureaucracy determines and sometimes even hinders the actions of the protagonists. At the same time, everyday administrative failures in a fictional region called EUROPER (which stands for Europe périphérique) repeatedly claim human lives.
The author works as an analyst of EU foreign and enlargement policy. This is her debut novel.
(short stories) Gabriela Guimarães Gazzinelli, A gaveta e o abismo: contos de terror e burocracia [The Drawer and the Abyss: Tales of Terror and Bureaucracy] (Edições Jabuticaba, 2022)
“In the office, we come across minor muses. They are of obscure origin. In a burst of desk-bound lyricism, someone of little inspiration might venture to say that they were born from Gournay and Weber. But, to be quite honest, I wouldn’t exactly say they were born. Perhaps they were instituted by interministerial decree.”
“The work is a rare example of a volume entirely dedicated to the intricacies of government offices and their dimly lit corridors. Since Gazzinelli is a diplomat, here bureaucracy is seasoned with the flavor of international relations and consular life: a border demarcation course, a diplomatic incident between French chickens and a Brazilian guard dog, embassy cocktail parties, a new modality of the right to nationality. The author skillfully manipulates irony and, with language that often emulates that used in more formal official documents, constructs comical and absurd situations without losing verisimilitude.”
→ TV Series
Parliament (Belgium, France, Germany, 2020 - ongoing)
Seen through the perspective of a young parliamentary assistant, the series portrays the daily life of MEPs and their teams—marked by relentless speed, performance pressure, idealism, and the ambiguous space between intrigue and networking.
“Samy, a young European parliamentary assistant, arrives in Brussels a few weeks after the Brexit referendum. He is obviously not fit for the job. In fact, Samy doesn’t know much about European institutions and he hopes to get away with it thanks to his wit and cleverness. He quickly gets assigned an obscure mission: write a report on finning (the act of removing fins from sharks).
How do you get a report adopted at the European Parliament? He has six months to figure it out, six months to master the secrets of the Parliament. Powerful forces will work against him - to start with, a general indifference. Nobody cares about saving sharks - they are far less popular than dolphins. Samy embarks on a journey made of trials and sacrifices, alternating between psychodrama and comedy.”
Dips (Sweden, 2018 - 2026)
Three incompetent diplomats at the Swedish Foreign Affairs Department are a constant threat to world peace.
The third season of this comedy series is scheduled to air in 2026.
Utopia (Australia, 2014 - ongoing)
With 5 seasons and counting, this workplace comedy is set inside the offices of the Australian “Nation Building Authority”—a newly created government organization responsible for overseeing major infrastructure projects.
EVENTS
→ International conferences
Architecture and the Power of Bureaucracy (November 6-7, 2025, Vienna)
This conference explored the material implications of bureaucratic measures, arguing that they have had a significant impact on architectural practice and urban form since the late nineteenth century. Its aim was to incorporate bureaucracy into architectural theory and history discourses as an indispensable and powerful element in the construction process.
With the advent of the modern state, civil servants commissioned public architecture and urban plans by setting rules and regulations.
Philipp Männle has already asked the question: “To what extent does architecture require a functioning administration, and where is bureaucracy necessary or useful?” The conference aimed to find answers and trace arguments that demonstrate the importance of bureaucracy in the realisation of architecture throughout the long 20th century.
The full program is available here.
Visuelle Repräsentationen des Parlamentarismus seit 1789. Ein europäisches Panorama (November 26-28, 2025, The German Historical Institute in Paris), organized by Andreas Biefang and Jürgen Finger.
“Modern parliamentarism cannot exist without visual representations. As a representative form of government, based on free elections and a free mandate, it relies on written, oral and visual communication with the ‘people’ to establish and maintain the voters’ trust in the political representation. For, as Hans Kelsen wrote as early as 1926, political representation in parliament is a ‘fiction’ whose credibility must be permanently confirmed through communication.
Since the late eighteenth century, numerous images of parliamentary life have been created in Great Britain and France, and subsequently in all states that established modern parliaments – either as self‐representations of the parliaments and their members or as attributions by photojournalists, photographers, caricaturists, and artist observers. These images were disseminated as public images through a variety of media and became part of a public discourse on parliaments. This widespread tradition has so far only been selectively examined. Above all, a pan‐European perspective is missing that would allow comparisons to be made between different parliamentary regimes of openness, transparency, and visibility or to address the question of whether and to what extent there was or is a shared, specifically European imaginaire, a visual culture of parliamentarism.”
The full program is available here.
Bureaucratic Infrastructures—seminar at the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) annual conference in Boston, October 9 - Oct 12, 2025.
Led by Caroline Z. Krzakowski (Northern Michigan University) and Nissa Ren Cannon (Stanford University), this seminar examined
“the social and cultural productions that are made possible by modernist bureaucratic infrastructures, as well as the conditions that call for new bureaucratic systems. Both infrastructure and bureaucracy become visible by producing vast amounts of tangible records, documents, and paperwork. Although bureaucracy has its roots in the nineteenth century, modernism comes of age as both governmental and non-governmental institutions and infrastructures - cultural agencies, publishers, insurance companies, funding bodies, and migration controls - adapt and respond to a new set of conditions created by the advent of new technologies, globalization, war, and human migration.”
→ Public Talks
Europa Erlesen: Brüssel in Realität und Fiction / Brussells in Reality and in Fiction (Bonn, April 8, 2025)
Alongside Austrian author Theresia Töglhofer and Austrian actor Lucas Englander, the event explored the inner workings of European democracy, how it is portrayed in the media, and the role young people play within it. The conversation drew inspiration from Töglhofer’s debut novel Tatendrang (Drive to Action), which follows a group of young interns at the European Union’s external headquarters. The discussion also turned to the Franco-German-Belgian political satire Parlament (Parliament), which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the European Parliament through the eyes of a young parliamentary assistant. Adding a real-world perspective, Louisa von Essen of the Young European Federalists NRW shared her own experiences and insights into the day-to-day realities of working within the European Parliament.
The event was part of the Europa Erlesen literature series, a collaboration between the NRW Literature Office and the NRW State Chancellery, and it was hosted by the Bonn Literature House at the University of Bonn.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
Invisible Agents: Ministries and Architecture (1908-1938).
Policies, Principles, and Projects in Central European Ministries of Public Works
The first half of the 20th century saw intense activity by Ministries of Public Works in Austria-Hungary and its successor states, yet architectural history has largely focused on styles, architects, and individual buildings, overlooking these institutions as central actors.
This project shifts the perspective toward ministries as key commissioners, proposing a deeper understanding of architecture through the lens of institutional decision-making. By situating historical and contemporary attitudes toward the relationship between architects and state institutions in Central Europe, it highlights the diversity of state architecture while also exposing persistent biases in scholarly discourse.
Focusing on the largely underexplored role of state institutions opens new pathways for reassessing modern architectural history. Through an examination of the initiatives, practices, and key figures of ministries in Austria-Hungary and the early Czechoslovak and Austrian Republics, the project clarifies the scope, quality, and variety of state involvement in architecture. Comparing official building agendas across different countries sheds light on policy approaches within diverse political systems and on shifting state priorities during periods of profound transformation, offering fresh insight into the interplay between cultural and political elites in modern Europe.
The project is co-funded by the Austrian Science Fund and the Czech Science Foundation.
ONLINE ARTICLES
(blog post) Jonathan Foster and Alexandra Irimia, Rule by Algorithm: A Bureaucratic Horror Story, KWI Blog, October 6, 2025.
“Historically, the introduction of new administrative technologies always comes with the promise of rational order and delivers, alongside an approximation of such order, new forms of confusion, exclusion, and harm. It might be that the true horror of bureaucracy lies not in its errors and inefficiencies, but in the fantasy of total efficiency itself.”
(newsletter entry) Armin Nassehi, Montagsblock 347, November 3, 2025.
“On closer inspection, the consensus about “too much” bureaucracy might only serve to mask the underlying debate about reconciling freedom and predictability. Bureaucracy is merely the symptom; the disease is the lack of balance between deviation and regulation. And an intelligent bureaucracy could then be more than a symptom, perhaps even the cure.”
(interview) Alexandra Irimia interviewed by Katrin Piecha for the University of Bonn, November 10, 2025.
(English) In the Maze of Forms: The Curious Allure of Bureaucracy
(German) Im Labyrinth der Formulare: Die seltsame Anziehungskraft der Bürokratie
(reportage) Katharina Meyer zu Eppendorf, Die fabelhafte Welt der Bürokratie, Die Zeit Campus, January 22, 2026.
Bureaucritics benefits from input from our subscribers, friends, and colleagues—you’re welcome to drop us suggestions at bureaucritics@gmail.com. For this issue, we are particularly grateful for the tips we received from Christian Berger, Cristian Cercel, Irina Dumitrescu, Viktor Englund, Marc Holzer, Katharina Müller, Kerstin Stüssel, and Theresia Töglhofer.
That’s all for this filing cycle.
If this issue is any indication, bureaucracy in the humanities and in popular culture is not winding down but branching out. New research, new artwork, and new alliances are constantly taking shape.
Watch this space—and join us in building more of it!
It shouldn’t be long until our next dispatch.
Bureaucritically,
Alexandra and Jonathan