Unpacking the Global and the Intimate of anti-terrorism trials

Keywords: Auto-Ethnography; Court Ethnography; Feminist Geopolitics; Global Intimate; Feminist Geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 34

Abstract

What touched me most in the last five years of my field work on German anti-terrorism trials, were not the many convictions, defamations or confessions of the accused, but the many conversations and intimate interactions with their wives, mothers, neighbors, appraisers, lawyers and guards. Those who were there for them, day by day, paid or unpaid, desired or unwanted. Some of them were united by their faith in the good, others by their contempt for the scum that comes to light in these negotiations. It was all about those moments of embodied listening, in shared waiting areas, restrooms or parking lots, which gradually deepened my understanding of what the trials, and the wider legal process, made visible, erased, privileged, or was blind to (Faria et. al. 2020).

I would like to point on these multiple encounters as methodological challenges, entry-points of self-reflexivity and moments of embodied experiences, which are key to an auto-ethnographic analysis. By focusing on three vignettes out of my empirical data and by revisiting England’s (1994) “Getting personal”, I argue, that such disrupting research relationships have much to offer to a feminist analysis of the ‘global intimacies’ (Mountz and Hyndman 2006) of power including its expressions through the law. Rethinking the field of court ethnographies in this way, as a site of messy, affective, embodied and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by feminist geographic courtroom ethnography, attentive to unpack the space-law-tangle from below.