Home > Research > Projects > Funded by the Law School's Research Seed-Corn F...
View graph of relations

Funded by the Law School's Research Seed-Corn Fund: The Power of Images: photography, law and the Albanian and Polish political trials

Project: Research

Description

My project considers law as a matter of aesthetics and memory. It builds upon my work concerning the maladministration of justice in post-dictatorial Europe (Transitional Criminal Justice in Post-Dictatorial and Post-Conflict Societies, Intersentia, 2015) and seeks to make an original contribution to the fields of transitional justice (the way in which a post-dictatorial regime addresses past injustices) and comparative criminal justice and, more broadly, interdisciplinary studies. My study considers the visual images of political trials carried out in Albania and Poland under communist rule during the Stalinist period (broadly 1944-1956). Albanian and Polish archives are rich with visual images that have yet to be analysed. My project’s key question considers the power of the image and what it conveys about the law through the eye of the Observer (regime via the media) and the Spectator (defendant and society). Some of these visual images currently form part of the states’ contemporary approaches to ‘remembering the past’, making the complex use of the image when handled as part of a transitional justice measure an important part of my study. These photographs will be accompanied by the respective personal biographies.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date4/05/15 → …