Sites of Resistance: Death Row Homepages and the Politics of Compassion

Abstract

Contemporary forms of state-sanctioned violence present a stark challenge to understanding the place of empathy and moral solidarity in modern society (Ginzburg, 1994; Sznaider, 1998; Moyn, 2006). A vast body of ethnographic research on social suffering points to the consequences of cultural practices that place certain people outside the realm of human category (Scheper-Hughes, 1997; Glover, 1999; Das and Kleinman, 2001). All too often, these practices prove central to garnering public consent for state-sanctioned policies of violence. To combat these effects, sociologists like Iain Wilkinson highlight the potential for the mass media to engender amongst members of the public a greater imagination of the suffering of others (Wilkinson, 2005: 15). Wilkinson’s point is that people’s mediated experiences of suffering play a central role in what he calls ‘the politics of compassion’ (ibid.: 6, 92).KeywordsDeath PenaltyDiscussion BoardYouth GangCritical SociologySite AdministratorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.