Current Research

Book project tentatively titled Documentaries Against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity 

The past two decades have seen an explosion in documentary films focusing on criminal trials, wrongful convictions, and unsolved crimes. Where traditional trial and true-crime documentaries provide certainty and closure because the case is solved and the criminal punished, this new wave of documentaries places the legal system under scrutiny. This project provides a detailed examination of the structural and aesthetic affinities between trials and documentaries through a close analysis of contemporary Spanish “juridical documentaries,” films that re-examine trials that resulted in miscarriages of justice. What constitutes evidence in these documentaries? What interpretative frames do they deploy to present facts and events? What alternative images of law and justice do they construct? Interrogating trial and documentary together helps us better understand the complex relation between evidence and narrative, facts and truth, knowledge and reality, and law and justice.

Edited volume: Espacios y límites de la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea. Granada: Comares.

The goal of this edited volume is to examine the main conceptual discussions around spatial (in)justices in contemporary Spain. The concept of spatial (in)justice is proposed as an ethical and political reference to analyze and challenge the inequalities inherent in the processes of capitalist production of space. On the one hand, despite the economic crisis of 2008, Spanish cities continue to be the center of capital investment and real estate speculation, thus perpetuating the model of neoliberal urbanism and the processes of gentrification, exclusion, and segregation that accompany it. On the other hand, the centrality of the city widens the gap between the rural and urban worlds, forcing the displacement of rural population to urban centers in search of a job or basic services, and the depopulation and abandonment of rural areas (the “emptied Spain”). Finally, the era of the “Anthropocene” or “Capitalocene” forces us to go beyond the rural-urban dichotomy and to think of a topography of a spatial (in)justice that recognizes the effects of climate change and its relationship with the capitalist system.