Embodied Exhibits: Toward a Feminist Geographic Courtroom Ethnography

Geographien des Ein- und Ausschlusses: Strafvollzug und -prozesse im Kontext der Aufarbeitung von Beteiligungshandlungen im syrischen Bürgerkrieg

“…1 Für allgemeine Hinweise zum Projekt siehe auch: Klosterkamp und Reuber (2017), für eine methodische und forschungsethische Reflektion dieser Arbeit siehe: Faria et al (2020), Klosterkamp (2020).…”

Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence

“… Faria et al (2019) argued for more work by geographers to interrogate ways of connecting everyday legal activities and “the trans -scalar structural machinations of state violence.” Indeed, to situate the spatial politics of courts, multiple spaces need to be seen as interconnected. On one occasion, after a court session finished, four fellow courtroom observer-companions and I travelled together from the courthouse in downtown Vancouver to a NEB hearing in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, to see a parallel space of pipeline politics – where efforts were afoot by the Federal Government to pressure Indigenous leaders who opposed the pipeline.…”

“…Courthouses can reflect, perpetuate and reproduce forms of colonialism in a myriad of ways. Some may be visible in the arrangement of courthouses themselves ( Faria et al, 2019 ; Jeffrey, 2019 ), others through the relations, “performative use of categorisation” ( Blomley, 2015 ) and “spatial tactics” ( Sylvestre et al, 2020 ) in particular cases and decisions rendered. In Vancouver, Canada, there is a corridor in the British Columbia (BC) Supreme Court building where more than seventy portraits of white male judges appear on the wall, uninterrupted by female or non-white faces.…”

“… Walenta (2020) argues that, broadly speaking, geography as a field has only very minimally engaged courtroom ethnography as a method, despite its considerable potential for interrogating intersections of legal space, political geographies of power and lived experiences. Likewise, Faria et al (2019) call for more attention by geographers to the “spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence.” Contextualising the political geographies of one particularly symbolic set of court proceedings – connected to a highly controversial oil pipeline expansion – provides a way of building upon this. I also extend arguments by Simpson (2019) , who, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, suggests thinking about the relation between settler colonialism and bitumen as a “resource desiring machine”; describing the violence of the Alberta oil/bitumen story, Simpson argues: “the remaking of bitumen as a resource in the Athabasca region served a purpose even more immediate than capitalist accumulation – it served to consolidate a nascent settler colonial state's claims to authority over territory.” This discussion is furthered by Schmidt (2020) , unpacking setter-colonial discourses around bitumen, its political geology and temporality, and its dominance.…”

(Counter)Terrorism and the Intimate

“…One such setting is the courtroom where legal framings of terrorism manifest materially through embodied court proceedings. In extremely rare ethnographic courtroom research on Islamic terrorism in Germany, Sarah Klosterkamp shows the ways embodiment plays an important role in the court, arguing that "disembodiment might heighten, enable, or mute the layers of power at work in the courtroom, dehumanizing the defendant or respondent and ultimately enabling unjust decisions" (Faria et al 2020(Faria et al : 1103. And fi nally, there has been a growth of ethnographic work on radicalization that has become an important and widespread state strategy of countering terrorism (Alloul 2019;Jaminé and Fadil 2019;Kublitz 2021;Nguyen 2019).…”