Introduction: Testimony in Culture and Cultures of Testimony

Jones and Woods state the case for a Handbook of Testimony and Culture against the background of the growth in the amount and types of material that are regarded as testimony, the ever-present nature of testimony in the public sphere, the relatively new interest in perpetrator testimony and the discussion of how to evaluate it. The authors also set out the new ways in which emerging technologies mediate testimony. In the light of all these major developments Jones and Woods argue that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited, and they explain that the purpose of the Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.