Annie Macdonald Langstaff Workshop | Gendered Legal Technicalities and Flagrant Criminal Offences in Chile

Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in lower criminal courts and in one unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Santiago, Chile, this talk will explore the ways in which criminal offences that are considered “flagrant” are treated by the Chilean criminal justice system. From their identification on the streets by police officers to their reassignment to a different unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office or their adjudication at a criminal court, flagrant criminal offences are defined by a specific way of approaching the alleged facts, which is translated into specific organizational and documentary practices. As a technicality, the flagrant character of a criminal offence conveys certain epistemological assumptions about how to determine what happened and what exactly constitutes the criminal offence. In the first part of this talk, Dr. Araya-Moreno will discuss the data and analysis presented in the paper. The second part will reflect on the implications of her work for the ethnographic study of criminal law bureaucracies and, particularly, how legal technicalities convey certain assumptions about gender in Chile.

Bio

Dr. Javiera Araya-Moreno is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Ethnography Lab at Concordia University and the Centro de investigación en derecho y sociedad at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Santiago, Chile. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Université de Montréal. In her research, Dr. Araya-Moreno focuses on how criminal law shapes people's daily lives in Chile, and particularly on how criminal justice bureaucracies treat crimes through specific socio-legal arrangements. Recent publications can be found in the Law & Society Review, Anthropologica, Estudios Socio-Jurídicos, and Hospitality & Society.