Strikethrough studies

Strikethrough studies is a collection of screendance (an artform combining dance and film) that brings performative research methods into dialogue with the field of socio-legal studies. The research uses movement to reveal the affective force of typographical forms of retraction, such as redaction or deletion, and the consequences of this for law.

Strikethrough studies is a screendance-based research enquiry (an artform combining dance and film) that uses performative research to generate new insights within socio-legal studies. It was developed as a collaborative part of Jacob’s AHRC Fellowship (Judging the medics’ science) which examined the way typographical forms of retraction, such as redaction and deletion, operate as a legal dispositif (Foucault 1978) used to display integrity within General Medical Council disciplinary decisions. This performative research uses screendance to make the movement of law, normally concealed within static typographical forms of erasure, tangible as a felt affective force. The work involves the artist’s body, positioning the personal as political in order to open up multivalent understandings of the visceral, embodied ways in which legal retraction impacts individuals in multifarious contexts, beyond medicine. This PaR also exposes the temporality of legal materials, which appear timeless, bringing attention to the role an affective sense of inscription plays, within digital retraction, in the affirmation of legal integrity. These findings, as I articulate in a companion article, produce impactful, ontic understandings of the ‘mortal form of law- making’s effect at the moment of impact’ (Jacob & Macdonald 2019: 269). This research innovatively addressing the absence of embodied research in both Jacob’s work, and the wider socio-legal field, despite abundant literature concerning the materialities of law. It also represents an important methodological innovation within screendance that provides a model for future interdisciplinary applications. The work has been disseminated across: Law Text Culture; AHRC Legal Materiality Research Network; Law and Humanities; Talking Humanities (SAS, UOL) and the AHRC Science in Culture Theme 2021 report, showing its interdisciplinary impact. Its international reach is further demonstrated by Tim Ingold’s exploration of the artwork within an anthropological framework in both his SIEF 2020 keynote, and in a dedicated chapter in his monograph Correspondences (2021).