Keynote Speaker: The Capitol Riots and Performance Crime with Dr. Sandra Jeppesen

Event Date: 
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm EST
Event Location: 
OA 1025
Event Contact Name: 
Rebecca Heffernan
Event Contact E-mail: 

About the talk

The Capitol riots of January 6, 2021 was arguably the most filmed and photographed riot in history. The smashing of a window by Proud Boy Dominic Pelozza was photographed and widely shared online. Participants posted thousands of selfies and selfie-videos to social media, in which they were performing, confirming, or boasting about crimes they were committing. This is known as performance crime--the performance of criminal activity in which filming or photographing one’s crime and sharing it with an audience is intrinsic to the crime itself. Many of these selfies and selfie-videos were subsequently used as evidence in legal cases against the Capitol rioters. In this talk, Sandra Jeppesen explores how performance crimes played out during the Capitol riots, and how citizens in general are increasingly putting themselves under surveillance, knowingly or not, doing the work of the police in tracking, collecting evidence, and prosecuting crimes against themselves.

Date: Tuesday, March 7
Time: 7 to 8 p.m.
Location: OA 1025, Simcoe Hall, Lakehead University | 500 University Ave., Orillia

Photo of Dr Sandra Jeppesen, Professor, Media, Film, and CommunicationsAbout the Speaker

Dr. Sandra Jeppesen is Professor in Media, Film & Communications. She has an HBASc in Systems Design Engineering, an MA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in English with a dissertation on anarchist media and culture. She has been at Lakehead since 2010, and currently teaches Alternative Media, Graphic Novels, and Calling Bullshit (which is about debunking disinformation). Her areas of research include alternative media, AI, algorithms, counter-data mapping, and smart cities from a grassroots perspective. She co-founded Lakehead’s Research Centre on Sustainable Communities where she is a board member, and has held the Lakehead University Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements. She has published three books in three years: Media Activist Research Ethics (Palgrave 2020), co-edited with Paola Sartoretto; Transformative Media: Intersectional Technopolitics from Indymedia to #BlackLivesMatter (UBC Press 2021), a monograph; and The Capitol Riots: Digital Media, Disinformation, and Democracy Under Attack (Routledge 2022), co-authored with Michael Hoechsmann, iowyth ulthiin, David VanDyke, and Miranda McKee.