Conference Forensic Cultures, 26-28 August 2021

On 26-28 August 2021, Utrecht University will be hosting the conference “Forensic Cultures”, an international online conference on the critical study of forensic cultures. This conference is part of the ERC-Consolidator project “Forensic Cultures in Europe, 1930-2000”.

In recent years research into the history of forensic science has expanded. In addition to institutional developments and advances in technology, increasingly the entanglements between legal frameworks, forensic institutes, technology and culture have been explored by historians and scholars from other disciplines. These entanglements come together in the notion of ‘forensic cultures’, which may be defined as the theory and practice of forensic science, medicine and psychiatry as they come to the fore in specific locations such as the courtroom, the mortuary, textbooks of forensic medicine, psychiatric assessment reports or the media. Moreover, these forensic practices are embedded in cultural contexts and political regimes. Forensic cultures can thus refer to both the representation and the practice of forensics. The conference aims to explore these different forensic cultures through a critical review of its constituting components and through different lenses such as Science and Technology Studies, praxiography, new materialism, history of knowledge, cultural theory, critical legal studies, and gender and queer theory.

The program will feature keynote speaker professor Alison Adam who will be speaking on blood typing, gender and forensic objectivity. Other contributors will focus on local, national or transnational forensic cultures from the perspective of new empirical research and different theoretical approaches.

The conference will take place online. If you would like to attend, please send an email to: forensiccultures@gmail.com. The link to the conference will then be sent to you in due time.

For more information and the full programme, see: https://force.sites.uu.nl/call-for-papers-conference-forensic-cultures/

Provisional Conference Programme “Forensic Cultures”

Thursday 26th of August

9:00 Welcome by Willemijn Ruberg

9:15 Keynote Alison Adam, ‘Blood will out: blood typing, gender and forensic objectivity’

10:15 Break

10:30 Panel 1: Infanticide and Forensic Expertise

Chair: Willemijn Ruberg

·       Siska van der Plas, ‘The role of gender in the image of male and female child murderers in Dutch courtrooms and newspapers, 1960-1989’

·       Tony Ward and Rachel Dixon, ‘Infanticide cases, forensic evidence and the element of certainty in twentieth-century England’

·       Daniel Grey, ‘The Lady Vanishes? Forensic culture, “common sense” and the ongoing problem of infanticide in England and Wales, 1900-2020’

·       Sara Serrano Martínez, ‘The umbilical cord problem and experts’ and judges’ attitudes towards infanticide in the Spanish forensic culture (c. 1923-1959)’

12:10 Lunch

13:00 Panel 2: Political Regimes and Disciplines

Chair: TBD

·       Kateřina Lišková, ‘Sexology as forensic science in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. On the intersections of expertise with the state and changes in the understanding of sexual deviance’

·       Volha Parfenchyk, ‘How law reads emotions: Translating the motive of jealousy into Russian legal discourse’

·       Mikhail Pogorelov, ‘Redefining professional jurisdiction of forensic psychiatry in early Soviet Russia, 1918 – 1936’

14:25 Break

14:40

Panel 3: The Authority of Experts in the Courtroom

Chair: Volha Parfenchyk

·       Svein Atle Skålevåg, ‘Forensic cultures and the relative significance of criminal responsibility’

·       Gethin Rees, ‘Forensic expert marginalisation: Post-controversy science in the courtroom’

·       Sandra Menenteau, ‘From the art to the science of reports: Legal expectations and medical responses regarding autopsy reports in the 19th century France’

·       Samuel Scharff, ‘Competing forensic cultures at the intersection of psychiatry and American law, 1949-1954’

16:30 Closing

Friday 27th of August

9:00 Panel 4: Knowledge Transfer

Chair: TBA

·       Annette Mülberger, ‘Teaching psychology to jurists: The first Spanisch textbook by Mira (1932)’

·       Ana María Gómez López, ‘Forensic taphonomy and its multiple histories’

·       Heather Wolffram, ‘Teaching Grossian criminalistics in Imperial Germany’

·       Nicola Labanca, ‘Dissecting the Italian crime scene. Salvatore Ottolenghi, the founder of Italian academic forensic science and his unpublished university lectures between politics and history’

10:40 Early lunch break

12:45 Panel 5: Performance of Forensic Science

Chair: Kateřina Lišková

·       Pauline Dirven, ‘The forensic expert look: Embodied performances of forensic expertise, England 1920-1950’

·       Filipe Santos, ‘The “key” to the crime: Criminal cases and the projection of expectations about forensics DNA technologies in the Portuguese press’

·       Željana Tunić, ‘”Forensic lookalikes”. Imitating forensic gestures and producing nationalistic truth regimes in late-socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states’

14:10 Break

 14:20

Panel 6: Sexual Violence and Forensic Expertise

Chair: Pauline Dirven

·       Stephanie Wright, ‘”Facts that are declared proven”: Francoism, forensic medicine, and the policing of sexual violence in twentieth-century Spain’

·       Alejandra Palafox Menegazzi, ‘Medical-forensic representations of the crime of rape in Chile (1900-1950)’

·       Lara Bergers, ‘The making of a victim. Investigative and trial practices in twentieth-century Dutch sex crimes cases’

15:45 Break

16:00 Networking Activity

17:00 Closing

Saturday 28th of August

9:00 Panel 7: Mass Violence and Forensic Evidence

Chair: Sara Serrano-Martínez

·       Taline Garibian, ‘Forensics in death camps. Keit Mant’s investigations on Nazi Germany crimes’

·       María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra, ‘Sorting victims out: humanitarian and judicial forensic peace-making in the Colombian (post) conflict context’

·       Alexa Stiller, ‘Mass violence, international criminal tribunals and the increase in non-governmental forensic investigations in the 1990s’

10:25 Break

10:35 Panel 8: Politics and Identification Practices

Chair: Lara Bergers

·       Franco Capozzi, ‘Reassessing the legacy of Cesare Lombroso: Criminal anthropology in the courtroom in Liberal and Fascist Italy (1910-1930)’

·       Emilia Musumeci, ‘Identifying the enemy: Forensic culture in Fascist Italy’

·       Helena Machado, ‘From early start of criminal DNA databases to contemporary data politics in forensic genetics’

12:00 Break

12:15 Closing Comments

12:45 Closing