Citizen forensics

This article seeks to identify and explain the emergence of a new form of online communication that we describe as ‘citizen forensics’. Citizen forensics encompasses the range of online exchanges that adopt a forensic register to decode and deduce the facts of a case or incident. This phenomenon has not emerged in a vacuum or without consequence. We put forward a three-stage conceptualisation of the phenomenon that unpacks its core features as a distinctive genre of online claims-making, locating citizen forensics within two antecedent histories (of crime scene investigation and atrocity forensics), its immediate conditions of production, and its use and effects as a political resource. We highlight that – contrary to the promise of forensic truth – citizen forensics represents a form of expertise that has ‘escaped the lab’, decoupled from its traditional sites of adjudication, and often becomes complicit within and effects its own forms of denial. We conclude by exploring what the emergence of citizen forensics tells us more broadly about forensic culture in the early 21st century.