Producing Absolute Truth: <i>CSI</i> Science as Wishful Thinking

Kruse, Corinna

doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01198.x

Cited by 53 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…I will not go further into these public debates here. See, e.g., Lawson 2009;Toobin 2007;Schweitzer and Saks 2007;Kruse 2010;Cole andDioso-Villa 2009, andLovgren 2004. 8.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forensic Fiction and the Normalization of Surveillance

Hausken

2014

Nordicom Review

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This essay investigates forensic fiction as a trend in televised crime fiction and argues that this trend or subgenre is particularly interesting if we are to understand how surveillance is portrayed in contemporary society. The essay looks particularly into an extremely popular example of forensic fiction, namely CSI and its two spin-offs CSI: NY and CSI: Miami. Through a discussion of the conceptions of knowledge, crime and power, which seem to come forth in the three CSI series, the present article argues that the particular blend of technological optimism, positivism and moralism that can be witnessed in forensic fiction in general, and in CSI in particular, is important to understanding how popular culture lends a certain normalization of surveillance to everyday life.

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“…I will not go further into these public debates here. See, e.g., Lawson 2009;Toobin 2007;Schweitzer and Saks 2007;Kruse 2010;Cole andDioso-Villa 2009, andLovgren 2004. 8.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forensic Fiction and the Normalization of Surveillance

Hausken

2014

Nordicom Review

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“…Drawing on popular depictions of science as objective, authoritative, and unchanging (Mellor 2003;Kruse 2010;Messeri 2010), paranormal investigators embrace an idealized, technologically mediated understanding of science as a means of producing ultimate truth. Technology figures especially prominently in their understanding and execution of science.…”

Section: Paranormal Investigating and Belief In Contemporary Englandmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…While paranormal investigators worry about the objectivity of mediums' encounters with ghosts and their own uncanny experience, they hope that balancing these more subjective 'tools' with their technologies will yield reliable knowledge. Paranormal investigators expect the evidence yielded by these 'tools', in the form of stories and environmental data, to speak for itself, an assumption found throughout much of popular culture (Kruse 2010). When paranormal investigators imagined what might constitute a genuinely compelling piece of evidence that would support the existence of the paranormal, it often took the form of a correlation between a medium's reported encounter with a ghost and a mechanical register of an unusual presence, such as a spike in the EMF readings.…”

Section: Paranormal Investigating and Belief In Contemporary Englandmentioning

confidence: 98%

Redefining Rationality: Paranormal Investigators' Humour in England

Hanks

2014

Ethnos

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In contemporary England, amateur paranormal investigators are actively engaged in attempts to produce objective knowledge about the ghostly and paranormal. Their project requires them to balance subjective, personal encounters with objective, technologically mediated ones. In doing so, they struggle to align their project with dominant understandings of rationality. Drawing on an ethnographic study of knowledge production among paranormal investigators, I explore paranormal investigators' use of humour and argue that they rely on humorous performances to align themselves with a powerful, hegemonic notion of rationality. Through their humour, they do not contest the scope of rationality; rather, they locate themselves as central to it.

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“…The episodes usually begin with the discovery of a crime, followed by the recovery and analysis of traces and various interrogations, and culminate in the suspect being confronted with the evidence and their subsequent confession in the face of its apparently implacable certainty. As such, CSI offers a repertoire of wishful-thinking science (Kruse 2010), envisaging a better society in which crime is eradicated with the aid of forensic science.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prisoners' views of CSI's portrayal of forensic identification technologies: a grounded assessment

Machado

2012

New Genetics and Society

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Drawing on interviews with prison inmates in Portugal, the aim of this paper is to contribute towards a more practical approach and greater sensitivity to the situatedness of the so-called CSI effect by examining the heterogeneous elements involved in the construction of meanings for forensic science and technology. It discusses the ways in which this particular group's representations of forensic genetics reveal forms of exposure to, but also distancing from, the cultural images circulated by the media. The results indicate that, given that they are in an advantageous position for acquiring knowledge of these issues, this group is relatively skeptical of fictionalized portrayals of DNA technology as infallible and as the most powerful tool that can be used to solve crime. Prison inmates construct a grounded assessment of forensic technologies that derives from the position they occupy in the real world of crime and criminal investigation.

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Producing Absolute Truth: CSI Science as Wishful Thinking

Cited by 53 publications

References 29 publications

Forensic Fiction and the Normalization of Surveillance

Forensic Fiction and the Normalization of Surveillance

Redefining Rationality: Paranormal Investigators' Humour in England

Prisoners' views of CSI's portrayal of forensic identification technologies: a grounded assessment

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