Eyal Weizman will appear alongside Maja Petrović-Šteger (University of Cambridge) and Stewart Motha (Birkbeck) on the “Forensic Futures” panel at Birkbeck, University of London next week, as part of a week-long series of events called “Law on Trial”. The panel takes place on Wednesday the 18th of June at 6.30 pm in Room B34, Malet Street.

Forensics conjures the sense of a truth established by science in the service of the law. But the origin of ‘forensic’ in the Latin forensis – ‘pertaining to the forum’ – is more wide-ranging. Forensis invokes a site of negotiation between humans, technologies, and material things. This wider meaning opens the possibility of a forensic future where science and technology become the basis for holding states to account for mass violence and systematic neglect. Eyal Weizman and Maja Petrović-Šteger explore how new technologies, satellite imaging, landscapes, DNA, bones and human remains have emerged as material objects that ‘speak and testify’ to state crimes and mass violence. Their account of forensic architecture and the testimony of material objects point to the emergence of new forms of public truth.