[Commlist] CFP - Body-Worn Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence

Call for Chapters



/Body-Worn Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence: Embodied Witnessing/



Edited by Lewis Rarm (Victoria University of Wellington) and Federico 
Selvini (IULM University)



Since the early 2000s, wearable cameras have become increasingly 
prominent consumer recording technologies. Their development and 
commercial rise—driven in particular by GoPro, founded by Nick Woodman 
in 2002—were initially associated with extreme and action sports. These 
devices enabled athletes to record their own performances from a 
first-person perspective, even in remote and often inaccessible 
environments, without the assistance of a professional camera crew.


To meet these demands, wearable cameras were designed with a distinctive 
set of technical features: their reduced size and weight allow them to 
be mounted directly on the user’s body; their construction makes them 
resistant to impacts and adverse weather conditions; their high degree 
of automation minimises the need for continuous manual operation; and 
their fixed-focus, wide-angle lenses capture an extensive field of view.


Although they originated within a recreational context, the use of 
wearable cameras soon expanded beyond the boundaries of leisure and 
action-sports culture. They are now employed across a wide range of 
practices: soldiers and combatants use them to record their experiences 
in theatres of war; terrorist organisations and extremist actors 
incorporate the resulting footage into propaganda materials; and police 
forces have adopted body-worn cameras as evidentiary and accountability 
tools intended to document potentially controversial encounters.


Across contexts of armed conflict, terrorism, and policing, the 
technical and visual affordances of these devices have proved 
particularly effective in documenting violence through an embodied gaze. 
Wearable camera footage has consequently become central to the ways in 
which violence and potentially violent encounters are recorded, framed, 
circulated, authenticated, and contested.


Drawing on questions of witnessing, testimony, and violence, /Body-Worn 
Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence: Embodied 
Witnessing/ eschews the idea that wearable cameras are neutral recording 
instruments and instead examines how they instead a specific form of 
mediation. The footage they produce occupies an inherently ambiguous 
position: it may document acts of conflict and harm, generate forms of 
evidence and testimony, and contribute to public memory, but it may also 
reproduce and recirculate those acts, position viewers within the visual 
perspective of those who carry them out, or be mobilised for 
propagandistic, operational, and institutional purposes. Why are these 
technologies so frequently employed in such contexts? What forms of 
witnessing do they produce? How do they reshape the positions of 
witness, victim, perpetrator, and spectator?


Over the past fifteen years, a growing number of studies have addressed 
wearable cameras. Much of this scholarship, however, remains fragmented 
or centred on individual case studies. A more substantial body of 
research has developed around police body-worn cameras, but it has 
generally focused on issues related to privacy or on their legal, 
judicial, and operational effectiveness. Far less attention has been 
paid to the broader cultural and political implications of producing 
images through a camera physically attached to the body. Such images 
possess distinctive aesthetic, perceptual, and sensory characteristics 
that derive not only from their contexts of use but also from the 
technical and functional properties of the recording devices themselves.


The volume seeks to address this gap by bringing into dialogue scholars 
working across media studies and visual culture studies. It approaches 
wearable cameras as “machines of vision,” combining attention to media 
technologies, practices, and circulation with analyses of visuality, 
aesthetics, spectatorship, and representation. In doing so, it aims to 
develop critical perspectives on how wearable camera footage mediates 
violent events and experiences and reshapes established notions of 
witnessing and testimony.


The volume will be organised into three sections. Prospective 
contributors are invited to submit proposals addressing one of the 
following areas:


 1.

    Wearable Cameras in Conflict and Political Violence


This section examines images produced by wearable cameras in contexts of 
armed conflict and political violence. It traces the growing adoption of 
these devices during the Global War on Terror and their widespread 
presence in contemporary conventional and asymmetric warfare, terrorist 
attacks, and extremist violence. It considers the recording of armed 
conflict and political violence by direct participants to be a 
relatively recent yet increasingly established media practice, focusing 
on the visual forms generated by the encounter between the recording 
body, the technical apparatus, and the spatial, political, and symbolic 
terrain in which violence takes place. Contributions may address footage 
produced by a range of state and non-state actors, its aesthetic and 
technological characteristics, and the ways in which it constructs and 
circulates forms of vision, testimony, evidence, propaganda, memory, and 
spectatorship.

 2.

    Police Body-Worn Cameras and Visual Power


This section examines the images produced by police body-worn cameras 
and the contested visual cultures through which police encounters are 
made visible and such images acquire meaning and authority. It situates 
these images within a longer history of struggles over the visibility of 
policing, including recordings made by bystanders, citizens, and 
activists, while examining how the use of body-worn cameras reconfigures 
who produces such images, who controls their circulation, and how they 
come to function as evidence. Contributions may examine how the embodied 
and seemingly immediate perspective of body-worn cameras contributes to 
the construction of police footage as an objective record, and how 
institutional control over its production, selection, interpretation, 
and circulation shapes what becomes visible, intelligible, and 
contestable. The section welcomes analyses of the aesthetic and 
technological characteristics of these images; their relationship to 
surveillance, state violence, racialised policing, and institutional 
power; and their use across legal, journalistic, documentary, and 
digital media contexts.


 3.

    Embodiment and Witnessing: Pleasure and Resistance


This section considers the implications, effects, and affects of 
body-worn camera footage, which often depicts spectacular violence while 
eliciting both joy and dread in audiences. Contributions may examine the 
affective excesses of these images and the conditions under which 
footage of violent scenes provokes voyeuristic pleasure. The section 
also asks what might be salvaged from the violent entanglements within 
which body-worn cameras are deployed and their footage is produced and 
circulated. Can the pleasure generated by these images be rescued or 
redirected? Can body-worn camera footage offer possibilities for 
resistance or a line of escape from the regimes of power within which it 
is produced and circulated? Submissions may address the affective 
capacities of body-worn camera images, their mobilisation as forms of 
critique or resistance, or the relationship between these two dimensions.


Submission Guidelines


Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of 300-500 
words, accompanied by a short biographical note of approximately 100 
words and 3-5 keywords, by Sunday, 1 November 2026, via this form: 
_https://forms.gle/nM6afJWMcqgpyM3f6_ <https://forms.gle/nM6afJWMcqgpyM3f6>


Notifications of acceptance will be sent by Thursday, 10 December 2026.


Authors whose proposals are accepted will be required to submit their 
full chapters by Wednesday, 30 June 2027.


Chapters should be between 7,000 and 8,000 words in length, including 
notes and bibliography, and may include a maximum of three images. 
Authors are responsible for obtaining all necessary permissions and 
reproduction rights for any copyrighted or third-party material included 
in their chapters.


All chapters will be subject to double-blind peer review.


The volume will be published in English in 2028 by Routledge as part of 
the /Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies/ series.


For any enquiries, please contact (_lewis.rarm /at/ vuw.ac).nz_ 
<mailto:(lewis.rarm /at/ vuw.ac.nz)> and _federico.selvini@iulm.it_ 
<mailto:(federico.selvini /at/ iulm.it)>

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