Much of our daily lives is spent in the visual and virtual realm right now. Telehealth appointments, online teaching, Zoom court trials, and a heartbreaking deluge of photojournalism highlight just how central visuality is to our world.
We navigate that visuality with our particular bodily differences of race, gender, disability, and class, revealing the unevenness of that visual realm and the deep ethical and political issues it raises.
My guest on episode 140 of Imagine Otherwise is filmmaker and media studies scholar Sandra Ristovska, who has spent her career investigating the complex ethical, political, and legal relationship between imagery and human rights.
Drawing on her recent book Seeing Human Rights, Sandra explains the role of video evidence in simultaneously exposing and reproducing injustice, especially when such imagery circulates across national borders, social media platforms, and satellite feeds.
We talk about the uneasy relationship that courts have always had to visual evidence and the often life-and-death stakes of critical visual interpretation.
Finally, we close out our conversation with where we see the role of the visual going in the future and what it means to turn the act of seeing each other into a practice of human rights.
Sandra Ristovska
Sandra Ristovska is an assistant professor of media studies in the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Her research examines the interplay between images and human rights, particularly in institutional and legal contexts internationally and nationally.
Her scholarship is informed by her documentary filmmaking and premised on the understanding that without systematic guidance and applications for treating images as evidence, human rights and civil liberties are differentially recognized.
Sandra is the author of Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession (MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor of Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), as well as a recipient of the 2021 Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship.
