Evidence

This course will examine theories and methods pertaining to evidence as a process, a tool, and a failure. What kinds of evidence are rendered legible or legitimate? What is excluded? What cannot be measured at all? Through close reading and assignments involving both the production and critique of different evidentiary forms, students will be trained to methodologically apply a range of research skills from the archival to the ethnographic and observational. We will also consider particular forms confession, testimony, divine intervention character evidence, archival materials, expertise, and more to parse not only the limits of what can be known, but also the worlds that evidence makes possible and impossible.