Recording and monitoring police violence is a central aspect of protesters' experiences. In this paper, we turn from traditional conceptualizations of sousveillance to the idea of ‘civic forensics’ in efforts to examine how sousveillance strategies can be collectivized through civic-led accountability initiatives. As corporate social media platforms record and circulate images of police violence, they also archive footage. In our age of big and open data, this footage can be transformed from visual narrative into numbers, used in aggregation projects that put pressure on authorities to address force violations. 

About the Speaker:

Anna Feigenbaum is the author of Tear Gas (Verso 2017) and co-author of Protest Camps (Zed 2013). Her work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, as well as in Vice, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, Salon, Financial Times, Open Democracy, New Internationalist, and Waging Nonviolence. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University where she runs the BU Civic Media Hub and Datalabs project. Her website is http://annafeigenbaum.com and you can follow her on twitter @drfigtree.