Download or read book Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture written by Lindsay Steenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies, traces, and interrogates contemporary American culture's fascination with forensic science. It looks to the many different sites, genres, and media where the forensic has become a cultural commonplace. It turns firstly to the most visible spaces where forensic science has captured the collective imagination: crime films and television programs. In contemporary screen culture, crime is increasingly framed as an area of scientific inquiry and, even more frequently, as an area of concern for female experts. One of the central concerns of this book is the gendered nature of expert scientific knowledge, as embodied by the ubiquitous character of the female investigator. Steenberg argues that our fascination with the forensic depends on our equal fascination with (and suspicion of) women's bodies—with the bodies of the women investigating and with the bodies of the mostly female victims under investigation.
Download or read book Juries Science and Popular Culture in the Age of Terror written by David Tait and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terrorism has become an everyday reality in most contemporary societies. In a context of heightened fear can juries be trusted to remain impartial when confronted by defendants charged with terrorism? Do they scrutinize prosecution cases carefully, or does emotion trump reason once the spectre of terrorism is invoked? This book examines these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the how jurors in terrorism trials are likely to respond to gruesome evidence, including beheading videos. The 'CSI effect' is examined as a possible response to forensic evidence, and jurors with different learning preferences are compared. Virtual interactive environments, built like computer games, may be created to provide animated reconstructions of the prosecution or defence case. This book reports on how to create such presentations, culminating in the analysis of a live simulated trial using interactive visual displays followed by jury deliberations. divThe team of international, transdisciplinary experts draw conclusions of global legal and political significance, and contribute to the growing scholarship on comparative counter-terrorism law. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners of law, criminal justice, forensic science and psychology.
Download or read book Global Forensic Cultures written by Ian Burney and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays explore forensic science in global and historical context, opening a critical window onto contemporary debates about the universal validity of present-day genomic forensic practices. Contemporary forensic science has achieved unprecedented visibility as a compelling example of applied expertise. But the common public view—that we are living in an era of forensic deliverance, one exemplified by DNA typing—has masked the reality: that forensic science has always been unique, problematic, and contested. Global Forensic Cultures aims to rectify this problem by recognizing the universality of forensic questions and the variety of practices and institutions constructed to answer them. Groundbreaking essays written by leaders in the field address the complex and contentious histories of forensic techniques. Contributors also examine the co-evolution of these techniques with the professions creating and using them, with the systems of governance and jurisprudence in which they are used, and with the socioeconomic, political, racial, and gendered settings of that use. Exploring the profound effect of "location" (temporal and spatial) on the production and enactment of forms of forensic knowledge during the century before CSI became a household acronym, the book explores numerous related topics, including the notion of burden of proof, changing roles of experts and witnesses, the development and dissemination of forensic techniques and skills, the financial and practical constraints facing investigators, and cultures of forensics and of criminality within and against which forensic practitioners operate. Covering sites of modern and historic forensic innovation in the United States, Europe, and farther-flung imperial and global settings, these essays tell stories of blood, poison, corpses; tracking persons and attesting documents; truth-making, egregious racism, and sinister surveillance. Each chapter is a finely grained case study. Collectively, Global Forensic Cultures supplies a historical foundation for the critical appraisal of contemporary forensic institutions which has begun in the wake of DNA-based exonerations. Contributors: Bruno Bertherat, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, Binyamin Blum, Ian Burney, Marcus B. Carrier, Simon A. Cole, Christopher Hamlin, Jeffrey Jentzen, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Quentin (Trais) Pearson, Mitra Sharafi, Gagan Preet Singh, Heather Wolffram
Download or read book Visual Culture and the Forensic written by David Houston Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example in performance and installation art as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones’s analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity that has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory.
Download or read book Popular Culture Crime and Social Control written by Mathieu Deflem and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains contributions on the theme of popular culture, crime, and social control. This title includes chapters that tease out various criminologically relevant issues, pertaining to crime/deviance and/or the control thereof, on the basis of an analysis of various aspects and manifestations of popular culture, including music, and movies.
Download or read book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System written by M. Chris Fabricant and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative. The paperback edition features a brand-new index as well as an updated introduction and final chapter chronicling the Innocence Project’s continued fight against junk science in courtrooms across America.
Download or read book Vampire Forensics written by Mark Collins Jenkins and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Jenkins’s engrossing history draws on the latest science, anthropological and archaeological research to explore the origins of vampire stories, providing gripping historic and folkloric context for the concept of immortal beings who defy death by feeding on the lifeblood of others. From the earliest whispers of eternal evil in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, vampire tales flourished through the centuries and around the globe, fueled by superstition, sexual mystery, fear of disease and death, and the nagging anxiety that demons lurk everywhere. In Vampire Forensics, Mark Jenkins probes vampire legend to tease out the historical truths enshrined in the tales of terror: sherds of Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking demons; the amazing recent discovery by National Geographic archaeologist Matteo Borrini of a 16th-century Venetian grave of a plague victim and suspected vampire; and the Transylvanian castle of "Vlad the Impaler," whose bloodthirsty cruelty remains unsurpassed. Jenkins navigates centuries of lore and legend, adding new chapters to the chronicle and weaving an irresistibly seductive blend of superstition, psychology, and science sure to engross everyone from Anne Rice’s countless readers to serious students of archaeology and mythology.
Download or read book The Scientist in Popular Culture written by Rebecca Janicker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection, contributors analyze the depiction of scientists in a wide range of films and television programs that span across genres, including horror, science fiction, crime drama, comedy, and children’s media. Scientists in popular culture, they argue, often embody the hopes and fears associated with real-life science, which continue to be prevalent in both fictional and non-fiction media. By becoming the “human face” of scientific insight and innovation, the scientist in popular culture plays a key role in encouraging public engagement with scientific ideas. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and health communication will find this book particularly useful.
Download or read book Luminol Theory written by Laura E. Joyce and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-08-23 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations of forensic procedures saturate popular culture in both fiction and true crime. One of the most striking forensic tools used in these narratives is the chemical luminol, so named because it glows an eerie greenish-blue when it comes into contact with the tiniest drops of human blood.Luminol is a deeply ambivalent object: it is both a tool of the police, historically abused and misappropriated, and yet it offers hope to families of victims by allowing hidden crimes to surface. Forensic enquiry can exonerate those falsely accused of crimes, and yet the rise of forensic science is synonymous with the development of the deeply racist 'science' of eugenics.Luminol Theory investigates the possibility of using a tool of the state in subversive, or radical, ways. By introducing luminol as an agent of forensic inquiry, Luminol Theory approaches the exploratory stages that a crime scene investigation might take, exploring experimental literature as though these texts were 'crime scenes' in order to discover what this deeply strange object can tell us about crime, death, and history, to make visible violent crimes, and to offer a tangible encounter with death and finitude. At the luminol-drenched crime scene, flashes of illumination throw up words, sentences, and fragments that offer luminous, strange glimpses, bobbing up from below their polished surfaces. When luminol shines its light, it reveals, it is magical, it is prescient, and it has a nasty allure.TABLE OF CONTENTS // Preface: Christmas, Colorado, 1996 - Section I. Queer Light: Forensics, Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics - Section II. The Abject Parlour: Polyester Gothic, Traces at the Scene, Christmas in Colorado - Section III. Deadly Landscapes: The Shining, Colorado Histories, The Locus Terriblis - Conclusion: Necrolight, Luminol
Download or read book Death The Dead and Popular Culture written by Ruth Penfold-Mounce and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrayals of death and the dead are everywhere within popular culture revealing much about contemporary society’s engagement with mortality. Drawing upon celebrity posthumous careers, organ transplantation mythology and the fictional dead, this book considers how representations of the dead in popular culture exert powerful agency.
Download or read book Mystery Violence and Popular Culture written by John G. Cawelti and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and drag king, a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers. In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life s work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone s subjects have managed despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference to construct passionate, inspiring lives. Finalist, Foreword Magazine s Anthology of the Year Outstanding Book in the High School Category, selected by the American Association of School Libraries Best Book in Special Interest Category, selected by the Public Library Association "
Download or read book A History of Forensic Science written by Alison Adam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and when did forensic science originate in the UK? This question demands our attention because our understanding of present-day forensic science is vastly enriched through gaining an appreciation of what went before. A History of Forensic Science is the first book to consider the wide spectrum of influences which went into creating the discipline in Britain in the first part of the twentieth century. This book offers a history of the development of forensic sciences, centred on the UK, but with consideration of continental and colonial influences, from around 1880 to approximately 1940. This period was central to the formation of a separate discipline of forensic science with a distinct professional identity and this book charts the strategies of the new forensic scientists to gain an authoritative voice in the courtroom and to forge a professional identity in the space between forensic medicine, scientific policing, and independent expert witnessing. In so doing, it improves our understanding of how forensic science developed as it did. This book is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminology, the history of forensic science, science and technology studies and the history of policing.
Download or read book Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past written by Victor Buchli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past turns what is usually seen as a method for investigating the distant past onto the present. In doing so, it reveals fresh ways of looking both at ourselves and modern society as well as the discipline of archaeology. This volume represents the most recent research in this area and examines a variety of contexts including: * Art Deco * landfills * miner strikes * college fraternities * an abandoned council house.
Download or read book Forensic Science written by Jay Siegel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the phenomenal success of crime shows like CSI, forensic science has never been so popular. The obsessive attention that Grissom and his crew afford seemingly insignificant details, such as particles of dirt in a bullet wound and the presence of pollen in tyre tracks, have left audiences eager to know more about this field of study. In this fully revised and updated edition, real-life examples come under the scalpel as forensic scientist Jay Siegel follows the course of evidence all the way from the crime scene to the court judgement. In Forensic Science: A Beginner’s Guide, all major areas are covered, including drugs, trace evidence, pathology, entomology, odontology, anthropology, crime scene investigation and the law.
Download or read book Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science written by Ronald R. Thomas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the invention of the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America. Ronald R. Thomas examines the criminal body as a site of interpretation and enforcement in a wide range of fictional examples, from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. He is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the 'devices' - fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors - with which he discovers the truth and establishes his expertise, and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre. This is an interdisciplinary project, framing readings of literary texts with an analysis of contemporaneous developments in criminology, the rules of evidence, and modern scientific accounts of identity.
Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime Media and Popular Culture written by Nicole Hahn Rafter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018 with total page 2232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime and punishment fascinate. Overwhelming in their media dominance, they present us with our most popular television programs, films, novels, art works, video games, podcasts, social media streams and hashtags. This work offers a foundational space for understanding the cultural life and imaginative force and power of crime and punishment. Across five areas foundational to the study of crime and media, leading scholars from five continents engage cutting edge scholarship in order to provide definitive overviews of over 120 topics.
Download or read book Forensic Science and the Administration of Justice written by Kevin J. Strom and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uniting forensics, law, and social science in meaningful and relevant ways, Forensic Science and the Administration of Justice, by Kevin J. Strom and Matthew J. Hickman, is structured around current research on how forensic evidence is being used and how it is impacting the justice system. This unique book—written by nationally known scholars in the field—includes five sections that explore the demand for forensic services, the quality of forensic services, the utility of forensic services, post-conviction forensic issues, and the future role of forensic science in the administration of justice. The authors offer policy-relevant directions for both the criminal justice and forensic fields and demonstrate how the role of the crime laboratory in the American justice system is evolving in concert with technological advances as well as changing demands and competing pressures for laboratory resources.
