Events

The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) at the University of Salford welcomes Stefan Tarnowski (Early-Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge) for this online talk on his forthcoming article “Just Images: User-Generated Content, International Law, and Counterforensics,” with respondent Cécile Boëx.

Lawyers, scholars, and digital investigators have recently heralded a new evidentiary paradigm enabled by new media technologies (Dubberley, Koenig, and Murray 2020). Akin to the combination of bureaucratic documents and testimony used in the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Delage 2014), they suggest that the potential legal and forensic value of new media technologies signals a shift from the ‘era of the witness’ (Wieviorka 2006), towards more ‘material’ forms of evidence in the form of objects, files, code, and images spoken for by a new kind of expert (Weizman 2017). The Syrian war is a particularly important case study and precedent to test these claims. Lawyers and forensic investigators have called it the best documented conflict in history – with archives of leaked and salvaged state documents assembled and managed by non-governmental organizations (Burgis-Kasthala 2021; Ristovska 2019), as well as digital archives containing roughly 40 years’ worth of footage covering a 10-year period (Deutch 2020). Based on fieldwork at the Syrian Archive in 2019, during which I participated in an investigation into the aerial bombardment of medical facilities (2011-19), I analyze the epistemological foundations of a particular methodology (digital forensic investigation or ‘counterforensics’) focused on proving the evidentiary value of User-Generated Content. By listening across the claims of investigators, lawyers, and scholars – alongside the Syrians who speak in the video footage being investigated – I analyze the theories of visuality, expertise, evidence production, and evidence presentation that counterforensics engages. My guiding question is: are the visions of justice of activists and forensic investigators as harmonizable as expert communities assume and claim?

Stefan Tarnowski is an Early-Career Research Fellow (2022-6) at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His writing has recently appeared in American Ethnologist, Visual Anthropology, Review of Middle East Studies, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books. His book manuscript, Epistemic Murk: Media Activism, Revolution, and War in Syria follows how activists and assorted experts attempted to find social, technical, and political solutions to problems of doubt and uncertainty during the Syrian revolution and war.

Cécile Boëx is senior lecturer at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France. Her research interests include the Syrian uprising, digital commemoration of martyrs, online militant audiovisual cultures, and the role of images in violence. She teaches courses on political violence, documentary writing, and the interplay between images and politics. Her forthcoming co-edited volume Syria, Revolt and War in the Digital Age will be released later this year.

Tickets