Christina Spiesel

What Is Visual Knowledge, and What Is It Good For? Potential Ethnographic Lessons from the Field of Legal Practice

A firm basis exists for an instructive exchange between anthropologists and legal scholars regarding the production, dissemination, and interpretation of visual meaning in this digital era. The practice and theory of law and anthropology today are increasingly being shaped and informed by what appears on electronic screens—in the field, the workplace, and inside the classroom. Practicing lawyers and ethnographers need new tools of analysis and representation to meet the intellectual and aesthetic demands of digital visual rhetoric. This article offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the visual meaning-making process on the open source borderland between disciplinary expertise and pop cultural communication.

Gruesome Evidence: The Use of Beheading Videos and Other Disturbing Pictures in Terrorism Trials

Juries in terrorism trials may be asked to watch disturbing images as part of prosecution arguments about the motivation, context and consequences of incidents relevant to the case. How can legal systems take advantage of the compelling explanatory capacity of pictures while at the same time shielding the proceedings from prejudicial effects? This chapter explores the complex psychology of viewing to give participants in the legal system and members of the public alike a fuller appreciation of the forces in play when any (but especially gruesome) pictures are deployed as parts of cases. The author studies pictures in law, works with lawyers, and is herself a visual artist.

Trial by Ordeal: CSI and the Rule of Law

The popular American television dramatic series, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), with its emphasis on forensic analysis, has become an icon for anxieties within the legal system about truth-finding and legal outcomes. This chapter reviews empirical research on the “CSI effect” and then explores cultural dimensions of the show as suggested by analysis of its paradigms and style rather than the narrative content of specific episodes. CSI is related to larger trends within American legal culture and raises questions about the future of the rule of law. Open image in new window Photo: Gunshot Residue Lab, Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory, 2006. Christina Spiesel, All rights reserved.