A sustained attack on the authority of facts has turned human rights and environmental evidence into a battlefield, and this project will build a new model for producing trustworthy evidence by involving frontline communities directly in investigations. The problem is that traditional institutions—courts, universities, media—are losing their grip as arbiters of truth. State actors and counterfactual communities spread doubt online, making it harder to establish what happened in cases of police violence, border abuses, corporate environmental destruction, and colonial harms. The standard response is to defend existing authorities. This project takes a different approach: it argues that trust in facts improves when more people, especially those most affected, help produce them. If successful, the project will create a new investigative practice called “open verification.” Each real-world case will build a community of practice that integrates diverse viewpoints and forms of knowledge. The findings will reach the public through books, exhibitions, documentary films, and public programmes. This is applied research with immediate human rights implications—it aims to change how evidence is gathered, verified, and trusted in courts and public debate, not to advance fundamental science.
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A defining characteristic of our era is a sustained attack against the traditional authorities that underpins 'facts': government experts, universities, media and the judiciary. Furthermore, social media has become a place where state actors, belligerents, and 'counterfactual communities' spread doubt and construct alternative realities. Within this technological-political-epistemic crisis, facts around human and environmental rights violations have themselves become battlefields. A common response is to buttress the traditional custodians of factual authority; FAOV seeks to offer an alternative. Departing from the ground-breaking work of Forensic Architecture-founded by the PI a decade ago to use architectural tools and technologies to provide decisive evidence confronting human rights violations in courts, media and cultural venues-this project will develop a new mode of investigative practice that we call 'open verification'. FAOV will socialise the development and deployment of evidence through collaboration with frontline communities and diffused networks of specialists and investigators. It posits that both the quality of investigations and the trust in the facts they produce will be augmented if a greater number and a wider diversity of parties is involved in their production. With each new case, a new community of practice will be woven from the interaction of complementary and divergent viewpoints, and the integration of different forms of knowledge. FAOV will engage in real-world human rights casework, confronting nationalist "denialism" across four related domains: police violence against racialised communities, human rights violations at Europe's borders, environmental destruction by corporations, and colonial legacy. Each investigation is also a starting point for critical reflections on the new social, technological, and political life of facts, to be made public in books, exhibitions, documentary films and public programmes.
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