SPECTRE: Spatialized Ethnography of Crowds Through Reconstructed Ecologies
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Index brings its expertise in visual investigation and spatial reconstruction to SPECTRE, a project of the Centre for Research on Political Action at the University of Lausanne, which is building a visual ethnography set-up for studying protest crowds.
Still from Index’s digital reconstruction (2023) of the circumstances in which Jérôme Rodrigues lost an eye, in Paris, on 26 January 2019.
SPECTRE studies protest crowds as an object of the social sciences of politics: at once social spaces in their own right and spaces shaped by the apparatuses of power that manage them. To this end, the project is developing an ethnographic visualisation set-up inspired by the techniques of forensic architecture, combining disparate visual data with 3D reconstructions.
It is run at the Centre for Research on Political Action (CRAPUL), in the University of Lausanne’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, by Olivier Fillieule, Sélim Smaoui, and Hervé Rayner, with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, from August 2026 to July 2030.
Index, a partner in the project, will help develop an ethnographic visualisation set-up inspired by the methods of forensic architecture (drawing on disparate visual data and 3D reconstructions), able to capture the many dynamics at work in how crowds are governed on the ground.