Popular Vision

• In Event: 402 - Regular Session. Ethnomethodology

Abstract

In ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of scientific, legal and ordinary activities, visual evidence, and particularly video evidence, is both a topic and a resource. Such studies examine how participants in the activities they investigate present and make use of discursive, visual, and material evidence (or what counts as evidence). Of particular interest for the present study are so-called “viral videos” that have touched off public reactions as well as legal investigations in recent years. The videos, which are often treated as transparent evidence of excessive force (or worse) visited on victims by police or military forces, all-too-frequently are rendered as inconclusive by designated “experts” in legal and quasi-legal investigations. In addition to presenting epistemic disjunctures of interest in their own right, the analytical practices used during such investigations reflexively implicate the way videotapes and transcripts are used in social studies of those same practices. This presentation attempts to treat particular uses of evidence as a topic that includes professional video analyses as well as the activities they study.

Author

• Michael Lynch, Cornell University