A Tyranny of the Printed Form A Praxiography of Immigration Form-Filling Sessions at the MCS Romero Centre Gino Orticio, PhD (Sociology) 1 School of Professional and Cultural Learning, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this land on which QUT now stands. I recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and communities. I pay my respects to them, their living culture, their elders past and present, and most especially their present struggle for self-determination and development. Good afternoon. The auspiciously looking printed form is an intermediary to a standardized classification system of a networked information infrastructure. The form interrogates: it selects and collects elements of personal biographies then translates them into written or digital inscriptions (Bowker & Star, 1999) that are intelligible to the present Australian English system. These inscriptions are then translated across a network of human and non-human agents (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005) as data into an information infrastructure. The fabrication and intentionality of the printed form parses the complexities of the heterogeneous hinterland (Law, 1986; Law & Hassard, 1999; Law & Mol, 2002) in the form of data. Data is processesed, analysed, saved and retrieved as a basis for subsequent modes of action. Its configurations of the form is dry, terse, deliberate—heavily structured and coherent fitted in accordance to the present electronic information database on which serves its purpose. Mainstream Australia may see the act of filling up forms as a routinary, even naturalized, process. It is almost second nature for us to willfully disclose information with the anticipation of something in return. As willful participants of the printed form- we somehow relinquish ourselves by disclosing snippets of our own living biographies. We surrender ourselves to the interrogation of the printed form. It has become a part of a system’s way of 1 Paper during the Second Refugee and Asylum Seeker Conference and Film Festival at the QUT Kindler Theatre on 03 June 2015. This is part of a work in progress. Please do not cite.