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Book review: Corinna Kruse, The Social Life of Forensic Evidence

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorSameena Mulla
Published date01 May 2017
Date01 May 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617693707
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-18qkTsULZxlgVT/input 258
Theoretical Criminology 21(2)
References
Esping-Andersen G (1990) Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wacquant L (2012) Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism.
Social Anthropology 20(1): 66–79.
Corinna Kruse, The Social Life of Forensic Evidence, University of California Press: Berkeley, CA,
2016; 196 pp.: 9780520288393, US$39.95
Reviewed by: Sameena Mulla, Marquette University, USA
The Social Life of Forensic Evidence is a sharp and focused ethnographic exploration of
the production and circulation of forensic evidence through the adjoining sites of the
court, the police investigation unit, the crime lab and the crime scene. Kruse argues that
forensic evidence is marked by epistemological practices grounded in varying profes-
sional sensibilities. Based on field research in Sweden, Kruse accounts for the comple-
mentary and competing epistemic cultures of each interlocking site to trace the emergence
of legal-storytelling, epistemic friction and the management of uncertainty as the pri-
mary modalities characterizing the interpretation of forensic evidence throughout the
process of criminal investigation and adjudication. By epistemic friction, Kruse refers to
an infelicity between the modes of knowing and understanding forensic evidence
between each professional space which are resolved through translational work. Kruse
argues that this work is effected by means of a semi-transparent box, an object that she
proposes in relation to Bruno Latour’s black box. As she traces the reverse trajectory of
forensic evidence, she folds into her work a sense of the distinctive anticipatory struc-
tures that mark forensic evidence at each institutional site.
Kruse begins with the court of law, outlining the basic processes of the Swedish
legal system. She introduces the lay assessors and judges who decide cases, the princi-
ple of freedom of evidence that does away with admissibility issues commonly...

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