Rendering Justice: Media, Testimony, and Witnessing in the American Court of Public OpiniondissertationsLawrence, Heather ThompsoncreatorJoyrich, LynneAdvisorKoch, GertrudReaderGuterl, MatthewReaderMills, MaraReaderBrown University. Department of Modern Culture and Mediasponsor2025ix, 206 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025thesesThis dissertation contends that American society is currently witnessing the rise of what I have termed the jurified spectator: the individual media user who perceives their own judgment as having equal, if not more, legitimacy than the expertise of authorities (e.g., those in the courts, academic institutions, the fields of medicine and science, etc.) who have traditionally evaluated knowledge claims. This project theorizes the phenomenon of jurification by analyzing two distinct but interconnected areas of American culture: 1) the iconic image of the American jury trial as the ideal form for seeking justice and as the basis of the belief that the American public (as represented by a “jury of one’s peers”) serves as the ultimate source of judicial authority; and 2) the structures of digital and televisual media technologies that shape the way their users receive and communicate information. These two areas are linked by the concept of rendering—a term I propose to mark both the technological production of media representations and the socio-technological construction of meaning, new subject positions, and ultimately justice. Drawing from the fields of media and visual culture studies, African American and American studies, and feminist theory, this dissertation intervenes in some of the most pressing questions facing the trial’s role in American society today: What does it mean to seek justice? How is redress possible when some injuries and injured bodies are assigned different cultural value than others? Who is the ultimate arbiter of the trial’s narrative: the appointed jury or the spectating audience? Through its four structuring case studies—1) media mogul Alex Jones’ 2022 Sandy Hook conspiracy defamation trial; 2) amateur true crime media and the figure of the citizen sleuth; 3) QAnon and contemporary conspiracy media; and 4) the viral memes of Black Twitter—this dissertation offers a new study of the role of vision, narrative, and expertise in the project of seeking justice in the Information Age.media theoryDigital mediaFeminist theoryRacial justicePopular culturevisual cultureAmerican cultureTrue crimetrial narrativesconspiracy theoryEnglishRPB20250707