Research seminar with Dr Maria Elander (La Trobe Law School, Melbourne, Australia), on 17 October, on her current research on the affectual qualities of reconstruction and reenactment in forensic investigations in international criminal law. Researchers, teachers, practitioners, and students are welcome. No reservation needed.
Reconstructing the crime
As a technique of investigation, reenactments relay knowledge in ways that are rarely explored in legal scholarship. The significance of reenactments in film and theatre has resulted in rich bodies of scholarship that have contributed to discussions on memory, testimony and knowledge, but there is very little legal scholarship on reenactments in criminal investigations. While some kind of reconstruction is standard in forensic investigations, reenactments in inquisitorial judicial systems involve gathering the accused, witnesses and victims at the site of (an alleged) crime to reconstruct and reenact (alleged) events. This kind of reconstruction is an event of testimony, of confrontation and of testing evidence. Such a reenactment took place as part of the investigation at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia when former chairman of Khmer Rouge security centre S-21, alias Duch, returned to S-21 in 2008.
In this paper, I examine how reenactments in atrocity investigations ‘work’. Focusing on the ECCC reenactment as a case study, I am interested in the affectual qualities of being on site, the significance of space and body in the creation of memory and testimony. In theorising reenactments in atrocity investigations, I seek to draw attention to the work of law beyond the courtroom and beyond oral testimonies.
Bio: Dr Maria Elander is a senior lecturer and the Director of Graduate Research at La Trobe Law School. Her research is in the fields of international criminal justice, law and humanities (cultural legal studies) and feminist legal theory, and examines questions of representation and its limits (victimhood, gender and the visual), and has to date focused primarily on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. Her monograph, Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice, the Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Routledge, 2018) won the 2019 ECR Penny Pether Prize, awarded by the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia. Her research is currently focused on questions relating to testimony and archive in the aftermath of atrocity.