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.

Citizen forensics is clearly an expression of affective connection and humanitarian care for the dead, but also a powerful form of political action. By adopting specialist roles that are normally the preserve of the state, citizen forensics can heighten public awareness of the liminal status of the dead and disappeared, reproach state inaction and the failure of official investigations, or draw attention to state complicity in these crimes.

This project will bring together a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers, including activists and scientific practitioners, engaged with very different empirical cases, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives to map this emerging area of enquiry. The aim is to rigorously theorize the concept of citizen forensics, taking a critical perspective on its outcomes, its implications as a model for political action, and its intersection with the state. The risks and possibilities for academics engaging with this work will be assessed. A particular focus will be the materiality of these practices, paying close attention to the different physical properties of graves, bodies, DNA samples, and the genetic codes abstracted from them. Rapidly evolving techniques like the ‘bio-banking’ of DNA will be examined. This material focus will identify the political, memorial, affective, aesthetic, spatial and temporal affordances of these multiple materializations of the dead.