Research project Eyewitness video and human rights practice

The investigation will employ a practice-based, ethnographic approach to examine, over a four-year period (2022-2026), (1) how leading human rights organizations utilize and define eyewitness video as an evidentiary tool in their advocacy work, (2) how eyewitness video is incorporated and defined as a form of legal evidence in courtrooms, and (3) how grassroots image-makers themselves pose and put into action the justice potential of eyewitness video. The project will thus provide original insights into the emergent institutionalization of eyewitness video in a human rights context, tracing how this is affecting historical and current ways of doing and understanding human rights. As a result, the project will contribute to theoretical and conceptual developments regarding the issue of the transformative power of eyewitness video and its potential to re/shape discourses, privilege some players over others, and, more broadly, enhance the ability of human rights frameworks to respond to global injustice and abuses of power.

Project managers

Kari Andén Papadopoulos

Professor

Department of Media Studies

kari.anden-papadopoulos@ims.su.se

See profile page for Kari Andén Papadopoulos

The rationale for this project finds its primary definition in relation to current debates about the political promise of “cameras everywhere” to reconfigure relations of power and resistance in today’s political life, in general, and with regard to the new digital human rights landscape, in particular. The rise of new digital imaging technologies and platforms is held to have ushered in a new “age of democratic surveillance” (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2018: 59) with the radical potential to challenge and provide a counter-gaze against powerful and entrenched institutions (Reading 2009). Smartphones in particular have been posed as the perhaps most power-shifting device for civic and political activists (WITNESS, 2011, p. 19), marking a critical shift of communicative power away from a few dominant media actors to the movement of the multitude (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013; Khatib, 2013). It would seem, therefore, that this is a significant rupture in the history of the relationship between visuals and human rights, calling for a scholarly rethinking of traditional concepts of – and long-vested hopes in – the power of lens-based imagery to bear witness, enact human rights and contribute towards social change (e.g., Ristovska, 2016, 2021; Sliwinski, 2011; Torchin, 2012). 

The advent of digital video has ushered in a new era of digital witnessing that is extending the spaces and practices with which human rights work is typically associated (Ristovska and Price 2018). People now, almost routinely, present and articulate claims for rights and about injustice in images captured on digital (mobile) cameras and shared via online platforms (Keenan, 2017). The global upheavals in the 2000s, such as the Saffron revolution in Burma, the Green revolution in Iran, the Arab uprisings, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA are current reminders of the prevalence of video not only in exposing and providing evidence of injustice, but also in claiming the right to have rights. The emergent digital human rights landscape is thus characterized by a greater number and diversity of people engaged in human rights image production and sharing, seemingly permitting the struggling, the marginalized and the oppressed to transform themselves from objects of human rights discourse to empowered political subjects. 

Still, even in a digital landscape characterized by the radical decentrailization of political image production and distribution, predominant institutional frameworks and norms continue to shape the legitimation of human rights images (Andén-Papadopoulos 2020a, 2020b; Gregory 2015; McPherson, Thornton & Mahmoudi 2020; Ristovska 2019). Hence, while grassroots video activists may have increasing opportunities for their images to be seen and utilized by dominant human rights institutions, they may have less space to negotiate the interpretation of this imagery. This inequality maps onto the long-standing dominance of the West over the Global South in terms of interpretive authority and power in the production of human rights knowledge (McPherson, Thornton & Mahmoudi 2020). Important questions guiding this study are thus: who has the authority to endow eyewitness imagery with human rights meaning, how, and to what purposes? What norms, values, and power dynamics does this authority uphold? 

Accordingly, I have designed three research studies that, taken together, will offer an integrated analysis of the powered dynamics between three intersecting yet distinct fields of practice that crucially define the role and meaning of eyewitness imagery in the new digital human rights landscape: 1) international human rights advocacy, 2) international and national human rights legal practice and 3) local level human rights video activism. 

In thus calling attention to the major agents, spaces, and processes through which eyewitness videos are now afforded human rights meaning, the project follows calls for a practice theory approach to media research (Couldry 2004; Baker & Blaagaard 2016; Bräuchler & Postill 2010; Stephansen & Treré 2020). The media as practice paradigm proposes to theoretically (and practically) shift the focus of media research from the study of media texts or production structures to the study of the wider field of socially situated practices forming around and intersecting media. This way of doing ethnography through media practices brings into view, and holds together, both the agency of media practitioners - what they say, do and think in relation to media - and the constraints of structure, that is, the “wider infrastructural, legislative and political factors that both enable and constrain practice” (Postill 2010: 15). With the broad range of actors now attempting to claim a purchase on the justice potential of eyewitness video, the authority and legitimacy of this imagery are not pre- established. This research project therefore employs a practice-based framework in order to explore how grassroots activists and institutional agents variously put this imagery to use, specifically centering its analytical attention on the – sometimes conflictual - practices and interpretative labors that shape the evidentiary and human rights value of eyewitness images.