Forensic Fragments: Documentary, Testimony, and Political Memory in India

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring graduate fellow, Senjuti Mukherjee.

Radical documentary practices bear witness while catalysing political action, producing counter-hegemonic forms of memory and publicness amid disinformation and authoritarianism. Situated within Mukherjee’s dissertation on oppositional film and informal video cultures in post-1980s India, their project examines how forensic media fragments document, circulate, and mobilize evidence of state and communal violence. It compares two distinct media formations: early 2000s DigiCam footage preserved and annotated on the open-source archive PAD.MA, and contemporary smartphone videos and leaked CCTV footage circulated through Maktoob Media’s minority-rights platform. Bringing together archival research, digital ethnography, textual analysis, and interviews, the chapter traces shifts in circulation, permanence, authorship, and reuse across archival and algorithmic infrastructures. It argues that these fragments exceed their juridical status as evidence to function as documentary events that sustain counter-hegemonic memory, cultivate affective identification and solidarity, and reconfigure the political possibilities of documentary practice under contemporary authoritarianism.

Respondents include Paul Johnson from Communication + Mohammed Bamyeh, Professor of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.