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Paper short abstract

This paper examines “Death in Custody” — a digital archive documenting deaths of racialized people from police violence in German — as a practice of dark sousveillance that challenges epistemic hierarchies and creates alternative knowledge about racist police violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how civil society actors in Germany use digital counter-archives to challenge the epistemic asymmetry between police testimony and community knowledge of racist police violence. Focusing on the “Death in Custody” archive — created by an alliance of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-repression groups — which documents deaths of racialized people in custody or from police violence, I ask what forms of counter-seeing emerge when marginalized communities create their own records of such state violence. Drawing on Simone Browne's concept of ‘dark sousveillance’, defined as practices that reverse surveillance technologies to document and expose state violence, I analyze how this archive operates as a form of ‘watching back’. I argue that this archive reverses the racialized surveillance gaze historically directed at Black and racialized communities, thereby transforming tools of control into instruments of accountability. By employing visual ethnography to analyze the archive’s images and maps, I trace how digital witnessing is constituted through specific relational assemblages of activists, platforms, and infrastructural arrangements. This counter-archive, I contend, not only documents incidents absent from official records but also enact a form of epistemic resistance, thus creating alternative knowledge practices that contest whose testimony counts as evidence.