Sitting Next to Strangers: Toward a Social-Somatics of Courtwatching

• In Event: Materiality, Meaning, Agency & Value - I

Abstract

In the current Court Watch movement citizens exercise their constitutional right of assembly to critically observe criminal courtroom procedures in order to contest the unchecked power of prosecutors. Courtwatching occurs in a time of decreasing numbers of jury trials that renders US courtrooms nearly empty of citizen audiences. This talk presents ethnographic data on courtwatching groups as they collect information about courtroom activity. The courts heavily police courtroom audience communication. Collective observations are obstructed by the vigorous interdiction of recording devices among courtroom audiences where neither photography nor audio recorders are permitted to assist in the capture of live events. Recording and reporting case information thus emerge into two critical problems of media use and individual and collective memory retrieval within the courtwatching activity. First is a media problem about tracking and remembering ‘what happened’ during court activity. Second is how to record audience opinions, affects, and feelings about what they have just observed. These problems are entwined and lead courtwatchers to problematize just what courtroom phenomena may become data and how to transform data into information and finally political knowledge.

My ethnographic practice intervenes in the material transformation of the courtroom audience through critically designed notebooks and paper forms. Court audiences are passed a common notebook to anonymously record their observations. I discuss the production of experimental writing and physical movement among audiences. Then I show how the creation of critical audience marginalia—notes, scribbles, comments, doodles, glosses and annotations—recover the absent labor history of our constitutional right to assemble. Anonymous notebooks generate courtroom audience paperwork as documentation of law produced not by law professionals and their computers, but by the people and their hands.

Author

• Kelli Moore, New York University