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Activist Videos and the Courtroom

Fri, May 26, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 2, Indigo 202A

Abstract

This paper examines how human rights groups professionalize video activism in order to play to the institutional logic and professional practices associated with the law. To do so, it looks at the work of iWitness, a video collective that operated in the early 2000s as one of the first activist groups to record and successfully use video evidence of police misconduct in the U.S., and the current video practices of WITNESS and Human Rights Watch, two international human rights organizations based in New York City. Through archival research of websites, documents and news coverage of iWitness as well as via ethnography of WITNESS and Human Rights Watch, the paper maps how activists have diversified their tactics in response to the visual turn in the law in order to partake in the development of visual legal standards and the production of legal knowledge. Specifically, the paper tackles how these groups work with video evidence, develop custom technology to help establish the authenticity of video records, conduct video as evidence training and produce videos for trials as a way of extending the spaces where activist videos can make a social difference. The paper argues that the advent of digital video is facilitating a new relationship between courts and human rights groups who are now seeking to actively shape the evidentiary potential of image practices.

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