Witnessing is infused in ethical and legal discourses that operate within the matrix of knowledge, responsibility, and action. Through an analysis of the non-governmental organization WITNESS, this article shows how this matrix has been at the heart of the development of professionalized human rights video activism that emphasizes goal-driven, tactical and audience-oriented approaches to witness documentation. By professionalizing video activism, human rights organizations like WITNESS configure the act of bearing witness as a form of social activism that differs from longstanding modes of activist involvement. Using the term strategic witnessing to describe this development, this article suggests a conceptual framework through which we can think about evolving forms of media witnessing in the contemporary media moment.

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experimental, ethical, and critical futures for the monograph; futures in which scholars take greater responsibility for their continued engagement with the scholarly book's becoming' (p. 3). The book is positioned within a wider framework critiquing 'the idea of the human around which so much of the humanities has been built' and connecting 'to a larger movement toward formulating a posthumanities' (p. 11). The book is split into Introduction and five substantial chapters on the most characteristic features of the discourse of book history; academic authorship; the commodification of the book object; experiments on radical open access book publishing and 'liquid books and fluid humanities ' (p. 199).

This paper examines the role and scope of eyewitness images in open-source investigation, which is becoming a prominent genre of conflict reporting in its own right. Based on interviews with journalists at the Visual Investigations Unit at The New York Times and a textual analysis of their video reports, the paper sheds light on the paradoxical working of the genre, which simultaneously opens up and limits opportunities for eyewitness images as a platform for voice. The paper thus argues that despite the journalists’ commitment to innovation, the logics of institutions, the corporate ethos of social media platforms, and the pervasive power of geopolitics continue to shape the articulation, recognition, and agency of voice.

This article maps the institutional context that renders eyewitness video meaningful for human rights purposes. By looking closely at the work of Syrian Archive, this article argues that human rights collectives are positioning themselves as visual experts that both mimic established institutional modalities and help offset the lack of replicable workflows and clear visual standards for eyewitness video across journalism, the law and political advocacy. In doing so, this article illuminates the larger information networks that characterize the production, circulation and legitimacy of human rights videos today. k e y w O r D S eyewitness video • human rights • new institutionalism • Syrian Archive • verification • visual evidence