Affectual intensities: toward a politics of listening in court ethnography

Abstract

Listening occurs in many ways in fieldwork situations, but it is not always consensual or without complexities. It is especially challenging in situations deeply embedded in institutional power, rendered and shaped by the law and its objectives. Yet, how listening differ within and between sites saturated with institutional knowledge remain still understudied. In this paper, I use my five-year fieldwork experience in German antiterrorism trials to illustrate how applying different politics of listening gradually deepened my understanding of what the trial and the wider legal process as a whole were making visible, erasing, privileging, or ignoring. I suggest that such an approach has much to contribute to a feminist analysis of (state) power, including its expression through the law, by back-bound different modes of listening to three different occasions within the court and its antechambers. Rethinking the process of knowledge production within court ethnography in this way can provide a demonstration of the insights offered by a politics of listening that is alive to the affectual intensities that emerge out of and through our bodies’ engagements, coping with, negotiating over, and healing from the objectives that appear within these highly institutionalized and much powerful settings.