ABSTRACT Poignant, complex relationships exist between forensic evidence, people’s efforts to comprehend painful events, and the role of story-structures and storytelling. While there is intense public interest in criminal cases, and while law and criminology research acknowledges the centrality of narrative in criminal justice matters, significantly more research is needed to better understand the complicated intersections between criminal procedure, sense-making, and affect. The field of life writing has much to offer inquiry into legal and judicial processes. This article considers how life writing might be deployed as a research method to study dimensions of criminal justice otherwise overlooked. Using unsolved homicide as a case study, it examines how people’s framing of justice processes in narrative terms powerfully influences the way unresolved cases are experienced. It then suggests how life writing forms may offer ways to illuminate and critique people’s problematic relationships to ‘story’, and how they can animate people’s complex relationships between extreme happenings and everyday objects and places. In this way, the article reveals the potential of life writing to significantly advance knowledge in institutional fields that have so far traditionally been studied using other methods.

中文翻译：

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故事的问题：刑事证据、影响和意义

摘要 法医证据、人们理解痛苦事件的努力以及故事结构和讲故事的作用之间存在着尖锐而复杂的关系。虽然公众对刑事案件有着浓厚的兴趣，虽然法律和犯罪学研究承认叙事在刑事司法事务中​​的核心地位，但还需要更多的研究来更好地理解刑事程序、意义构建和情感之间复杂的交集。生活写作领域对法律和司法程序有很多探索。本文考虑如何将生活写作作为研究刑事司法维度的研究方法，否则会被忽视。使用未解决的凶杀案作为案例研究，它考察了人们在叙事方面对正义过程的构架如何有力地影响未解决案件的体验方式。然后，它建议生活写作形式如何提供方法来阐明和批判人们与“故事”之间存在问题的关系，以及它们如何使人们在极端事件与日常物品和地点之间的复杂关系变得生动起来。通过这种方式，本文揭示了生活写作的潜力，可以显着提高迄今为止传统上使用其他方法研究的机构领域的知识。