Dead bodies in the criminological context and crime scene investigation (CSI)

In modern societies, death is no longer conceived solely as a biological end. Death and the dead body have become objects of power shaped by the state's modes of knowledge production, forensic practices, ideological representations, and technological networks. As an extension of the modern state's capacity to govern life and death, crime scene investigation (CSI) plays a pivotal role in this transformation. Accordingly, this thesis analyzes the sociological, political, and epistemological meanings of the dead body within CSI through an interdisciplinary framework informed by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Nikolas Rose, and Bruno Latour. It thus examines how, in criminological and sociological contexts and within CSI, the dead body is disciplined, legitimized, and reproduced. Methodologically, the study draws primarily on a systematic literature review, complemented by analyses of laws and regulations, historical cases, and the forensic corpus. The resulting insights are interpreted through the above theoretical lenses: Foucault's concepts of disciplinary society and biopolitics illuminate postmortem regulation; Althusser's theory of ideological apparatuses clarifies CSI's role in producing legitimacy; Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum explains representational dynamics across media and documentary records; Rose's governmentality frames the governance of death; and Latour's actor–network theory maps human and nonhuman interactions within CSI procedures. The thesis concludes that the dead body is not merely a criminal object but also a disciplinary, ideological, technological, and representational object of regulation. The analysis is grounded principally in sociology, which provides the conceptual terrain for articulating how death is reconstructed within the criminal domain.