Organisers:

David Houston Jones (University of Exeter) and Patrick Brian Smith (University of Warwick)

Participants:

Fiona Allen (University of Exeter), Cristina Costantini (University of Perugia), Larry Duffy (University of Kent), Claire Launchbury (UCL/University of Leeds), Laliv Melamed (University of Groningen), Alexa Neale (University of Sussex), Pooja Rangan (Amherst College), Helmuth Rosales (SITU Research), Kathryn Smith (Stellenbosch University)

The workshop aims to address the increasing prominence in recent years of the evidentiary and mediatory at the forefront of an emerging “forensic turn” across diverse fields of cultural practice. Such forensic practices have sought to explore how our engagement with the forensic is always an increasingly mediated experience, with new technologies reshaping the ways in which power can be scrutinised and held accountable. The deployment of evidentiary visual material in expert and non-expert environments, meanwhile, has become a particular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, when unprecedented problems of framing and mediation have attached themselves to the use of medical evidence. While expert knowledge has played a crucial role in the dissemination of evidence, that evidence has been accompanied by an insistent visual rhetoric which has remained largely unexplored. In addition to this contemporary focus, the project also addresses the deeper roots of forensic activity, focusing in particular on the institutional histories of practices now recognised as medical and forensic. Those histories frame visual practices in which objectivity and the production of evidence are the key stakes, and yet subjectivity and non-expert witnesses remain inescapably present.