The politics of visuality and talk in French courtroom proceedings with video links and remote participants

Abstract

In this paper, I study the management of visuality in French courtroom proceedings with video links and remote participants. I show how Goffmann's interactionism and Conversation Analysis can be used to provide participants and analysts alike with a standpoint from which to push for a more ‘egalitarian’ organization of agency in such courtroom settings, and therefore with a distinctive way to for analysts to make their findings matter to participants. For that purpose, I first show how one can identify a ‘derivative’ order of interaction of video-mediated interaction in general, and how it may be deployed in a context-sensitive way in such courtroom situations. Second, I use this analysis to show how, when engaging with the judicial field, while such interaction-oriented research can say little about the judicial decisions themselves, it has a lot to show and to report regarding the fairness of judicial proceedings in video-mediated courtroom ecologies.