Patrick G. Watson

The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See: Representations of Death in an Age of Digital Reproduction

Through the ongoing work of leak sites, public inquiries, criminal investigations, journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and others, the public has gained access to a growing number of videos of live military operations in recent years. Capturing such things as friendly fire attacks, civilian deaths and extrajudicial or illegal killings, these videos have attracted public and academic attention due to their ‘revelatory’ qualities. Through an analysis of two particular instances, WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder and footage of a targeted assassination by the Israeli Defence Force, we argue it is important to analyse exactly how such deaths are digitally re-presented if we are to make use of videos as data in the study of episodes of military violence and the evidential politics they give rise to.

Can Politicians Afford Knowledge? Evidence as Affordance in New Governance Oversight Arrangements

How do politicians see constituencies? Various academics have furnished elected officials with effective evidence of activities on the assumption that “better” information inevitably leads to better decisions. I propose we consider official information as seeings. I discuss how constituencies are seen or made sense of in a municipal scrutiny committee meeting in England. Using the notion of “affordance,” I will discuss not only how official evidence affords a perspective but also how that perspective is not reflective of the full spectrum of evidence that decision-makers may rely on to perform effectively.