With support from University Seminars
Join us for a faculty presentation of a work-in-progress with Professor Julie Stone Peters.
In April 2015, an article appeared in the Atlantic titled, “‘Thank God for Cellphone Video Cameras’: The Vast Technological Change Which Has Helped Make a Movement Possible.” We were seeing police violence as never before, caught by improved smartphone cameras and bodycam footage. The camera promised a different future. Forced to “adjust to a world caught on tape,” the police would have to change. As the ACLU declared, “video technology” was on the brink of producing “a full-fledged revolution in policing.”
In this talk Professor Peters will present her book-in-progress, which tells the stories of people caught in the crossfire of the camera wars. The book will recount how—in this world of newly ubiquitous recording—police, prosecutors, and a massive political machinery sought to neutralize what the camera showed. It’s the story of how officials sanitized images of violence, learned to finesse the rhetoric of reports and briefings, built evidentiary routines that fragmented, delayed, and recontextualized footage. And it’s the story of people who watched as police attorneys lied, bystanders whose cameras were destroyed, civil rights litigants whose videos were turned against them, family members who begged for bodycam footage showing a police killing but were turned away. It’s the story of how—in the most thoroughly documented era of state violence in American history—our cameras backfired.
In addition to discussing the project itself, Professor Peters will talk about the challenges of translating academic scholarship into writing for general audiences.
Please RSVP to comparativemedia@columbia.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings (and to receive access to campus, for non-Columbia affiliates).
Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and an affiliated Professor at Columbia Law School. She works at the intersection of law and humanities and media history, exploring performance, film, digital, and legal cultures from antiquity to the present. She is the author (most recently) of Law as Performance (2022) and Staging Witchcraft Before the Law (2024). She is Co-Editor of the Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities book series, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Humboldt Foundation fellowships, was most recently a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law, and teaches regularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. In addition to publishing academically, her writing has appeared in Slate, the London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Times, Village Voice, Public Books, and elsewhere.
This event is supported by the University Seminars at Columbia University and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.