Cassius Adair, PhD Candidate in the English Language and Literature program, uses three slices of archival text to explore how and why the relationship between government identification and U.S. citizens has changed over the last century.

From early protests against licensing rural drivers, to the mysterious removal of race -- but not gender -- from IDs at mid-century, to flame wars about anonymity and transgender life on the early internet, disagreements about the role of the government in regulating citizen's identities are a re-occurring feature of modern U.S. life. In order to understand how "undocumented" became a powerful political term, or why Voter ID laws spark such intense debate, Adair's research brings together an unlikely archive of minor "identification wars." Together, these scenes help illuminate the longer history of friction between state categorization and minority self-definition.

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