Analytical ethnography does not presume a principal analytical frame. It does not know (yet) where and when the field takes place. Rather, the ethnographer is in search for appropriate spatiotemporal frames in correspondence with the occurrences in the field. Accordingly, the author organizes a dialogue between conceptual frames and his various empirical accounts. He confronts snapshots of English Crown Court proceedings with models of event and process from micro-sociology and macro-sociology. A range of–more or less early or late, relevant or (...) irrelevant, contingent or predetermined–processual events serves as the vantage point to access event and process relations. In this line, Crown Court proceedings serve as an introductory and exemplary field for analytical ethnography, because they involve both: (strong) events and their process and (strong) processes and their events. (shrink)

This investigation examines the discursive history and contemporary courtroom discourse of expert witnesses in Anglo-American courts, incorporating the methods of Michel Foucault into a Critical Discourse Analysis framework. The history of experts is marked by a profound discontinuity in the role of experts, during the late medieval period, with experts relegated to a witness role instead of a juror role - that of the privately knowledgeable investigator - they previously held. Examination of the discourse of contemporary experts in three high-profile (...) US trials documents a different witness status for experts along three parameters: amplification of question responses; the use of the contrastive discourse marker well to express professional disagreement with their interlocutors; and the embedding of professional practices into so clauses. These parameters stand in sharp contrast to ordinary witness discourse. The study concludes with a discussion of the stakes in legal control of expert witnesses including asymmetrical access to experts by economic status, the possible suppression of some expert testimony by recent US Supreme Court decisions, and the hierarchicalization of expert knowledge. (shrink)