Brought into relation through the concept of false witness, both authors unsettle received histories of kinship economy, racialization, and evidence by delivering deft forensic readings of visual culture. Together, they model an interdisciplinary media studies that opens images, architectures, documents, public rituals, and material culture to questions at the heart of political life. Social reproduction emerges as the terrain on which law, media, and governance are built and contested.
Baghoolizadeh analyzed archival photographs of families from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran against popular and official narratives that disavow racialization and enslavement. As abolition efforts took hold in the late 1840s, Blackness underwent hypervisibility in direct association with enslavement. Enslaved people ran public errands, served as chaperones and protectors, and functioned as status markers for wealthy families. The 1929 Manumission Law formally ended slavery, but its aftermath also produced an erasure so complete that African ancestry was invisibilized, and relationships between enslavement and racialization largely disappeared from public histories.
Baghoolizadeh emphasized her commitment, as an interdisciplinary scholar, to recovering suppressed histories, especially for oppressed peoples. Telling stories about the reconfiguration of kinship economies is a means of building communities better equipped to understand themselves.
Moore extended concerns about false witness by unsettling the category of “domestic violence.” Rather than treating it as a stable sociological designation tied to intimacy or private life, she constructs a media, legal, and architectural history in which the domestic names a problem of personhood, knowledge, and political order.
Her analysis begins with the Republican Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution, where “domestic Violence” appears not as interpersonal harm but as a threat to the republic—a force the state must suppress to preserve political form. Close attention to this language reveals its entanglement with anxieties about Black freedom and the dissolution of the slave economy. By placing this constitutional “DV” alongside contemporary legal shorthand for intimate partner abuse, Moore stages a speculative reading in which capitalization, abbreviation, and bureaucratic coding carry historical meanings forward, even as their referents shift.
From legal text, Moore moves to the media architectures of courtrooms, slaveholds, domiciles, and other sites of witnessing, where optical devices operate as technologies of evidence management, visibility, and containment. The camera obscura, which is so often invoked as the origin point of modern spectatorship, is reread as an architectural form of captivity. This claim sharpens through Harriet Jacobs’s account of seven years spent hiding in a crawl space to evade sexual violence, watching her children through a narrow aperture.
Later chapters turn to anti–domestic violence campaigns and legal theater, where melodrama, cosmetics, and tactical strategies train spectators in what harm is supposed to look like. Moore develops the paired concepts of legal spectatorship and legal camp to describe a feedback loop between institutional seeing and aesthetic convention, where violence becomes information and suffering becomes data.
Moore has since expanded her work on ontological antagonisms between Blackness and visual technologies of proof through analyses of eye-tracking technologies in legal contexts; engagement with the works of artists who interrogate forms of violence materially—through hair, clay, wire, and replication; and through court watching projects that treat public attendance as a constitutional obligation and an evidentiary absence.
In conversation with the audience, Moore and Baghoolizadeh explored a distinction between genres of photography and bodies of images. They considered how legibility emerges when conventions haven’t yet emerged, and interpretive zones are unstable.
They discussed marriage as an institution that reveals social contest. Through divorce testimony, domestic disputes, and property transfers via dowries and marriage contracts, violence travels by proxy. Enslaved people functioned simultaneously as witnesses, assets, and persons. Slavery, domesticity, and legal form are bound into a shared communicative ecology.
The Q&A closed with reflections on method. Court watching, drawing, linguistic estrangement, and slow critical reading are practices of staying with uncertainty. Drawing in court is a mode of knowledge-making that resists evidentiary closure. Knowledge emerges from inhabiting spaces together, attending to their rhythms, architectures, and silences, rather than mastering them. Court watching can be practiced by artists, students, scholars, and community members. In its traces and public witnessing, it provides a vision of infrastructure for social life.
Finally, these authors urged us to let work take time. Grappling with settled accounts and evidentiary certainties means resisting erasure, and that requires stealing time from acceleration and professional churn, and spending it instead on noticing, attending, thinking. This is a call to serious intellectual engagement in civil society that is rigorous, imaginative, and unapologetically slow.
