Teaching for Research

When I started working on my second book, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia, I created a course to help my research. Specifically, I designed an undergraduate Legal Studies/History course called “History of Forensic Science” (HFS). I’d like to use this 3^rd guest post for August to reflect on how and why this was such a valuable experience.

More after the jump.

 I don’t have a lot of flexibility in my Law School teaching, as I must always teach a section of Contracts I for our incoming 1L class at the University of Wisconsin Law School. However, there is a lot more space to move with my undergraduate Legal Studies/History teaching at UW–Madison. I first taught HFS in spring 2014, and have taught it most years since (e-mail me if you’d like the syllabus: mitra.sharafi@wisc.edu). It has almost always been capped at 25 students. And for some reason (love of the True Crime genre?), almost all of my students in this one course have been women. I usually get 2-3 male students out of 25, and try to spread them out in small-group discussion exercises (as much they want to cluster together). Our Legal Studies program consists of majority female students, but my other Legal Studies/History course (Legal Pluralism) is not as heavily skewed as this one is.  

 Teaching this course has given me a good grip on the larger scholarship on forensic science around the world, especially in the English-speaking world from the nineteenth century to the present. When it came time to write, this allowed me to make comparative comments about patterns in colonial India that also existed elsewhere—or didn’t. For instance, our class sessions on death investigation and the coroner’s system in the Anglosphere gave me a good sense of how this medieval English institution has migrated across the world and continues to wreak havoc on many places. In rural counties of my own state of Wisconsin, for instance, the coroner decides whether a body should be sent to a forensic pathologist for a post mortem exam, and they also interpret the pathologist’s report when entering cause of death on the death certificate. The coroner is elected and needs to have a high school diploma, but no scientific or medical training of any kind. They are also not paid much. There were coroners in colonial India, too. They make an occasional appearance in my book, and I’m planning a future spin-off article on coroners in Bombay, using the larger literature I read for HFS.

 Most productive of all were our guest speakers. A series of forensic experts have come to my class over the years, including forensic pathologists, explosive detection dogs and their handlers, forensic botanists, and Crime Scene Investigation teams. It took me a while to understand how much these experts *like* doing class visits. During my early days of teaching, I invited colleagues from across my university to do the occasional guest class. It quickly became clear that these sessions were burdensome for my guests, so I stopped inviting them. By contrast, many forensic experts have an outreach component to their job, so a class visit allows them to meet this requirement. Many are also committed to raising public awareness and to encouraging young people to go into forensic professions, some of which (like forensic pathology) have national shortages. These experts were very generous with their speaking and travel time, and my students loved meeting them. Initially, I asked these speakers to give a presentation followed by Q&A. But as our students have become more and more silent since the pandemic, I eventually asked the speakers to prepare nothing at all. Now, they sit on a chair at the front of the class and we do 75 minutes of pure Q&A. I warn my students that there is nothing else on the menu, so they must come up with questions. And usually they rise to the occasion. It’s also less work for my guests.

 I learned many things from these experts that enriched my book. For instance, these visits got me thinking about forms of analysis that destroy the thing being analyzed (like an autopsy, as compared to many lab tests) and what this means for replicability and verifiability of an expert’s assessment. A second opinion is usually not possible in some forensic fields. Seeing what knowledge my students brought to the discussion from popular culture made me think about how certain forms of forensic expertise are often depicted in films, shows, and podcasts (like Crime Scene Investigation) while others are virtually unknown to the public (like wood forensics). And meeting explosives detection dogs revealed the overlap between firearms and explosives detection techniques, which I had failed to grasp before. These dogs detect smokeless powder in ballistics cases, for instance, and probably do more homicide cases involving firearms than bomb cases (which are more rare in the US). Although guns and bombs only appear in my book around the edges, this was useful contextual knowledge.

 The peak experience was optional and only available to my least squeamish students: our forensic pathologist visitors invite students to observe an autopsy later. I did this, and so do a handful of students every year. Sometimes someone faints. But mostly, it is a very unusual experience that people find valuable and that they will think about for years to come. This experience helped me appreciate the challenges of death investigation in a hot and humid environment like many parts of colonial India, particularly before the age of refrigeration.

 All in all, I recommend designing a course to get yourself in shape for your next book project.

 -Mitra Sharafi

[Image: autopsy diagram from the papers of Sir Henry Head, 1861-1940 (Wellcome Collection, public domain)]