In the context of the David Graeber Institute’s ongoing research into poetic and bureaucratic technologies, we are happy to invite to a public lecture on 7th of may at 6pm London time /1 PM New York time

This conversation examines bureaucracy as a material and epistemic engine of natural history. Rather than treating files, lists, permits, correspondence, and inventories as passive documentation, it will show how administrative routines shape what can be collected, named, circulated, or lost.

Drawing on cases from Spanish America it traces how the life and breakdown of natural history institutions become legible through their paperwork—through the forms and fragments that often outlast the museums themselves. Irina Podgorny examines bureaucracy as a descriptive and operational technology in the making of natural history. Rather than treating forms, instructions, permits, and inventories as neutral tools, they prescribe how the natural world must be observed, collected, classified, and recorded. By analyzing cataloguing rules, reporting formats, fieldwork instructions, and administrative correspondence found in archives across the Iberian world, we will discuss how paperwork produces specific versions of nature and organizes scientific practice long before specimens or collections appear.

The conversation will be streamed here on our Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/vem5R8B_HwU

Irina Podgorny is an Argentinean historian of science whose work traces the archival, bureaucratic, and material lives of natural history museums and fossil collections. She studies how institutions are built, documented, dismantled, and sometimes destroyed, working with dispersed files, administrative traces, and the remnants of scientific practices across Europe, Latin America, and Australia.