Datum: 20 november 2024
Tid: 10:00-11:45
Venue: Holländargatan 13, Stockholm
Research seminar with Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm university. At the Institute for Future Studies she heads the project Eyewitness video and Human Rights Practice that examines how the proliferating forms and practices of digital eyewitness video are reshaping ways of doing and understanding human rights.
Digital open source materials and methods have become increasingly important for the investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes, first widely evident in the conflict in Syria, then in Myanmar and Ukraine and most recently in Gaza. Today, investigators increasingly rely on publicly-accessible online information - including commercial satellite imagery, drone footage, eyewitness video and photography, and contextual information – to build evidentiary records of serious international crimes for court purposes. Meanwhile, private investigative bodies, such as the independent research-collective Bellingcat, are currently spearheading strategic efforts to standardize and systematize open source investigations to ensure that they can give rise to evidence that will be admissible and given due weight in criminal court.
In this talk, I consider how, in an era marked by “post-truth” discourses, digital open source investigation has become not only an alternative and increasingly widespread “truth practice” but recently also ever-more integrated with legal frameworks and judicial processes. Thereby, this emergent practice increasingly grounds its claims to truth and evidence in the institution of the law. In my talk, I ask: what may be disregarded when the legal system’s enduring stronghold both on what counts as visual evidence and who is authorized to produce and present it now works to confine the practice of digital open-source investigation to the interests and existing power structures of the law? Does this then create a (further) exclusion of alternative actors, methods, and visions of truth, evidence, and justice?
My talk will outline the features of the emergent regime of truth – the set of norms, discourses and practices – through which open source investigators now seek to reassert and reassess the status of online eyewitness video as legal evidence, so as to pin it down for scrutiny and critical discussion.
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