Digital Investigations Lab (Part 2)

Learning, Trauma, and Truth: A Student Perspective on Digital Investigations

What does it mean to learn law by documenting real harm in real time?

In Part 2 of this two‑episode LawPod series, host Eva Richards is joined by Kenzie Brodie and Briana Mallon, postgraduate students at Queen’s University Belfast, to explore the Digital Investigations Lab from the inside. This episode centres the student experience: how it feels to learn open source investigation techniques while working with traumatic material, contested narratives, and the very real lives behind the data.

Rather than theory or institutional design, this conversation focuses on practice, the tools students actually use, the cases that stayed with them, the skills they didn’t expect to develop, and how doing this work has reshaped the way they think about law, evidence, and responsibility.

It is a frank, reflective discussion about learning by doing, and about the emotional and ethical dimensions of researching war crimes from a distance.