The Problem of Story: Criminal Evidence, Affect, and Sense-making

ABSTRACT

Poignant, complex relationships exist between forensic evidence, people’s efforts to comprehend painful events, and the role of story-structures and storytelling. While there is intense public interest in criminal cases, and while law and criminology research acknowledges the centrality of narrative in criminal justice matters, significantly more research is needed to better understand the complicated intersections between criminal procedure, sense-making, and affect. The field of life writing has much to offer inquiry into legal and judicial processes. This article considers how life writing might be deployed as a research method to study dimensions of criminal justice otherwise overlooked. Using unsolved homicide as a case study, it examines how people’s framing of justice processes in narrative terms powerfully influences the way unresolved cases are experienced. It then suggests how life writing forms may offer ways to illuminate and critique people’s problematic relationships to ‘story’, and how they can animate people’s complex relationships between extreme happenings and everyday objects and places. In this way, the article reveals the potential of life writing to significantly advance knowledge in institutional fields that have so far traditionally been studied using other methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative nonfiction
• criminal justice
• narrative
• research methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Kate Rossmanith is an Author, Essayist and Academic. She has a background in anthropology and performance studies, her research examining narrative, emotion and the law. She also researches relationships between ethnographic methods and literary forms. Kate is the author of Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in love, life and law (Hardie Grant Books 2018), which explores remorse in the criminal justice system and remorse in our everyday personal lives. Based on ethnographic research, Small Wrongs interweaves fieldwork, philosophy and life writing, and has been nominated for national and international literary awards. Her work has appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Monthly, The Guardian and Best Australian Essays 2007. Kate is the co-editor of Remorse and Criminal Justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (Routledge, forthcoming). She lives in Sydney and is a senior lecturer in cultural studies and creative practice at Macquarie University.