Dr Layla Renshaw
Small Group Project 2019
Citizen Forensics: Materializing the Dead from Grave to Gene
Citizen forensics is an emerging phenomenon whereby laypeople take on the scientific investigation of crimes, assuming investigative roles normally associated with state actors such as the police, or technical specialists. The primary manifestation of citizen forensics is the search for the missing, or the dead, by their relatives and communities. This may be in the context of contemporary violence, in the case of the thousands of individuals abducted and murdered in Mexico, or resulting from historic events, such as the ongoing exhumation of hundreds of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War.
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Biography
Layla Renshaw is Associate Professor in Forensic Science at Kingston University, where she teaches forensic archaeology and anthropology and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research in human identification and skeletal analysis. She holds a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Forensic Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and a PhD in Anthropology, also from UCL. She joined Kingston in 2003.
Her research combines forensic and social sciences in the study of death and burial, with a strong focus on post-conflict and human rights investigations. She has worked as an assistant archaeologist with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, contributing to the exhumation and identification of war victims in post-war Kosovo, and has also worked in a consultative capacity for a number of UK police constabularies on human identification. One of her primary research areas is the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, on which she conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Spain with survivors, witnesses, forensic experts, and relatives of the dead, and published a monograph in 2011. More recently, she has focused on the recovery and commemoration of Australian and British First World War soldiers from Fromelles in northern France, examining processes of human identification, genetic testing, and the engagement of relatives. She has also organised a symposium and edited a special journal issue exploring the broader complexities of recovering war dead from post-colonial contexts.
Her research combines forensic and social sciences in the study of death and burial, with a strong focus on post-conflict and human rights investigations. She has worked as an assistant archaeologist with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, contributing to the exhumation and identification of war victims in post-war Kosovo, and has also worked in a consultative capacity for a number of UK police constabularies on human identification. One of her primary research areas is the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, on which she conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Spain with survivors, witnesses, forensic experts, and relatives of the dead, and published a monograph in 2011. More recently, she has focused on the recovery and commemoration of Australian and British First World War soldiers from Fromelles in northern France, examining processes of human identification, genetic testing, and the engagement of relatives. She has also organised a symposium and edited a special journal issue exploring the broader complexities of recovering war dead from post-colonial contexts.
Biographical details correct as of 30.04.26