Evans-Pritchard Lectures 2027 - Lecture 3: Screens / Appearance
Lecture 3: Screens / Appearance
Evans Pritchard Lectures 2026-27
Nomi Dave: Big Mouth: Sound, Law, and Sexual Justice
This lecture explores the case of a Guinean woman rape-survivor, known as Dame X, who chose to appear on a live TV news broadcast in 2019 to publicize her justice claim against a group of soldiers. I analyse these moments in relation to the legal notion of appearance, in which a party comes formally before the court. In this case, I consider appearance as audiovisual presence in the face of legal failures, as the State refused to pursue charges against Dame X’s assailants, yet Dame X and her supporters chose to appear otherwise.
About the series
This lecture series, Big Mouth, considers sound, listening, and media in relation to sexual justice. Exploring a series of legal cases in Conakry, Guinea, it asks how testimony is voiced, silenced, heard, and amplified in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. Each lecture is framed around an audiovisual mode and a socio-legal concept, showing how informal testimony re-orients the legal within a broader pursuit of justice. Big Mouth involves a research collaboration with the filmmaker Bremen Donovan and the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah, including a forthcoming book and an experimental documentary film directed by Bremen.
Nomi Dave is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music, St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She is a trained lawyer, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and DPhil in Music from Oxford. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics and Pleasure in Guinea, for which she received the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She founded and co-directed the Sound Justice Lab at the University of Virginia. She will be delivering a series of lectures on her new forthcoming book, Big Mouth: Sound, Law and Sexual Justice (University of Chicago Press).
