Concept Of Symbolic Violence Research Articles

Conference Report: Models of Perpetration and Transgression: Borderline Cases in Violence and Trauma Research

In very different ways the Stanford Prison experiment, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, and the intensified media coverage of the prevalence of sexual assault reveal that perpetrators are neither the ‘other’ of a society often perceived to be non-violent, nor are they to be found only at its margins. How can we develop a transgressive concept of perpetration that does not essentialize, stigmatize, or symbolically dehumanize perpetrator figures, but instead allows for perspectives that reflect the appropriate level of complexity? What is needed is a notion that describes perpetration in terms of implicatedness in violence , e.g. as something that can grow out of a victim’s position, or as a capability to carry out violence that can in certain situations develop in “perfectly normal people” . These questions were at the focus of the multidisciplinary conference “Models of Perpetration and Transgression. Borderline Cases in Violence and Trauma Research” (“Tatermodelle und Transgression. Grenzfalle in Gewalt- und Traumaforschung”), organized by Julia B. Kohne and Jan Mollenhauer, held on 19th January 2018 in the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. Talks were given by a wide range of international researchers, each of whom drew on their expertise to call into question crucial elements of how we understand perpetration and perpetratorship. These talks generated a discussion that encompassed the notion of perpetration in its broadest sense, starting with the psychology of victimhood and perpetratorship at the individual level, expanding to media representations that contribute to public discourse on perpetrators, both in terms of smaller-scale acts of violence, e.g. murders, and mass-scale perpetration of political violence, the effects of this discourse, (cultural) historical genealogies and contexts, as well as the traumatic consequences of perpetratorship. The following reflections upon the discussion should serve to inform current research on perpetration in the context of political violence by providing some helpful guidelines for approaching present challenges in this area.

The Teaching Excellence Framework: symbolic violence and the measured market in higher education

ABSTRACT In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon which effective teaching can be assessed. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and adopting policy framing as an analytical approach, we illustrate how the Teaching Excellence Framework and its related discursive techniques are significant in (re)producing the institutional conditions which enable market policy to operate effectively. The article focuses specifically on three core pillars of the marketisation project of English higher education that are strongly affirmed: the further enactment of students as consumers and universities as producers, the related pre-occupation with graduates’ employability and future returns and the uncritical application of metrics to signify institutions’ performance value. We show how misrecognition operates by a market policy cloaking itself under the guise of student empowerment and quality, and call for academic and political practices that forge acts of resistance.

VIOLENCIA SIMBÓLICA EN LA EDUCACIÓN FÍSICA ESCOLAR: UN ANÁLISIS CRÍTICO DE LAS EXPERIENCIAS NEGATIVAS DEL FUTURO PROFESORADO DE EDUCACIÓN PRIMARIA

Este estudo aprofunda as experiências negativas da Educação Física Escolar cursada pelo futuro docente de Educação Primária, usando o conceito de violência simbólica de Bourdieu para a análise. Foi realizada uma análise de 155 narrativas de estudantes de graduação em Educação Primária de duas universidades espanholas. Os resultados indicam que a violência simbólica é exercida pela inadequação das identidades físicas dos graduandos aos discursos do rendimento, os quais, por sua vez, são legitimados pelos docentes e por estudantes exitosos. Este tipo de violência subliminar projeta-se também nas identidades físicas e profissionais do futuro docente.

Son Preference among the Educated Urban Middle-class in North India

The prevalence of son preference among different socio-cultural and religious communities in India is an expression of patriarchal culture and values which highlights men’s social dominance and women’s subordinate position within this society. This qualitative study sheds light on how urban middle-class married mothers in the states of Delhi and Haryana, India, view and practice son preference. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 urban married, educated middle-class mothers who were recruited through the technique of snowballing. This research finds son preference to be deemed natural and acceptable by the urban middle-class women interviewed during the course of this study because of the various socio-cultural advantages associated with having a son. Old-age support, enhanced social status, women’s social dependency on men are some of the various socio-cultural benefits that participants attributed to the popularity of son preference. However, despite the prevalence of son preference, daughter aversion was not evident among the participants; they provided the same love, care, and education career opportunities to their daughters as they did to their sons. The research concludes that daughters’ social status is gradually improving as social attitudes among the urban middle-class are changing. This article suggests that women’s acceptance of son preference signifies that they have internalised their own gender subordination to the extent that they consider men to be socio-culturally and biologically superior to them. In order to examine this acceptance of gender subordination by women, I have employed Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and symbolic capital.

“They Give Teachers a Hard Time”: Symbolic Violence and Intersections of Race and Class in Interpretations of Teacher-student Relations

A number of studies identify racial and class differences in disciplinary actions and teacher-student interactions; however, scholars place less emphasis on how race and class intersect to shape classifications of teacher-student relations. Using findings from an ethnographic study in a high school with significant racial and class stratification, I examine how teachers and black students of varying social-class backgrounds describe teacher-student relations and academic disparities. I show how middle-class and some working-class Honors black students shared their teachers’ discourse about urban poor disengagement and “black” misbehavior with teachers. Meanwhile, working-class (primarily non-Honors) black students called out teacher mistreatment in light of experiencing punitive relations and problems with teachers. Some of their peers and teachers interpreted such calls of racism as “making excuses” for disengagement. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and misrecognition, I demonstrate the power of language about black student-teacher relations as school actors routinely legitimate race-class stereotypes in a diverse school.

The Concept of «Violence» in Sociological Discourse: Critical Tradition

The article is devoted to the analysis of sociological reflection of the phenomenon of violence in terms of its conceptual and ideological diversity. The classification of approaches to the study of violence in sociology, based on the relation of violence and sociality, is proposed: apologetic and critical traditions are identified in the sociological discourse of violence. The process of problematization of symbolic violence in the critical tradition of theorizing is studied. The concepts of K. Marx and F. Engels, A. Gramsci, N. Elias and M. Foucault are considered in detail from the point of view of their contribution to the sociology of violence in general. The author reveals how in the formation of the critical tradition the idea of the complexity and multidimensionality of the nature of violence develops, which excludes the possibility of reduction of the violence only to the physical one; therefore, therefore it is necessary to distinguish the other forms and types of violence – symbolic, psychological, structural, etc; the article focuses on the problem of the foundation of the concept of symbolic violence. The author comes to the conclusion that the concept of «symbolic violence» combines a variety of critical epistemological constructs, such as «domination», «alienation», «exploitation», «hegemony», «struggle», «establishments and outsiders» and others. The critical potential of the concept of «symbolic violence» lies, firstly, in the possibility of deconstruction of the obvious and everyday structures in order to find an embodiment of power relations, and secondly, in the allocation of interests of a certain group of people in the usual and routine relations of subordination and domination, concentrated in structures of everyday life.

‘How do we not go back to the factory?’

Urban governance has increasingly been shaped by neoliberalism, leading to the entrenchment of inequality based on intersecting categories of class, race/ethnicity, nation, gender and age. For groups like La Mujer Obrera (LMO), a Latina-led community-based organization that mobilizes against neoliberal development, it stands to reason that eschewing neoliberal practices would be straightforward. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and using multiple methods including semi-structured interviews with representatives of LMO and the local state, our case study demonstrates how even those who resist neoliberalism may embrace practices in conformity with it. Our analysis highlights how LMO’s entrepreneurial deployment of Latinx culture uneasily situated the organization for some time within the constraints of urban governance arrangements it was established to resist. Findings suggest that community development organizations might benefit by collaborating with others in pressuring state agents to revise criteria guiding development funding decisions, in order to obtain greater material support for pursuing their empowerment goals.

Homem de Deus quanto à idade e à raça: um olhar da análise do discurso para um artigo de publicação religiosa

A religião assumiu e ainda assume diversos posicionamentos quanto ao modo de se comportar das pessoas. Levando isso em consideração, este texto tem como desafio analisar um artigo religioso escrito pelo bispo Edir Macedo intitulado “Homem de Deus quanto à idade e à raça”, publicado na sessão de comportamento do site da Igreja. Nesse sentido, serão exploradas questões colocadas no artigo como sendo o comportamento ideal que um “homem de Deus” deveria adotar no momento da escolha de uma esposa. Para tanto, serão levados em conta as duas categorias elencadas no próprio texto de Macedo: a idade e a raça. Com este trabalho, objetivou-se questionar o papel de uma instituição religiosa frente às diferenças colocadas e historicamente perpetuadas entre homens e mulheres e entre brancos e negros, de forma a verificar como esta desigualdade é mantida e naturalizada pelo discurso. Para a análise, foram levadas em conta, principalmente, as teorias da Análise do Discurso de linha francesa, compreendendo as noções de ideologia e memória discursiva, a partir de Michel Pêcheux (1975), além de contribuições da Sociologia dos Campos a partir dos conceitos de violência simbólica e de habitus, de Pierre Bourdieu (2003). A partir da breve análise realizada, foi possível traçar considerações sobre o papel da Igreja como Aparelho Ideológico do Estado, como postula Louis Althusser (1996).

Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of Symbolic Violence: what´s happening into Colombian Classrooms?

This discussion paper arises from the academic proposal made for elective seminar of the Doctorate in Education from Universidad Santo Tomás in Bogotá Colombia ‘la violencia simbólica en la obra de Pierre Bourdieu y el acto pedagógico’. In a very particular scenario being presented in the Colombian nation in recent months in which the political, economic and cultural academic country seeks ways out of decades of war between the government and armed opposition groups, it is necessary that this topic enters into the classroom and reflect about these very pointed and particular tensions that every day are fought at schools, colleges or universities. In this sense, one of them has to do with power relationships between teachers and students, the study of its genesis, its development and evolution are essential for understanding today's school as the setting in which they are educating the new generation of Colombians who, apparently, will be the first to live in a country at peace. It is assumed therefore that the author’s ideas on Bourdieu’s theory stem from the author’s experience of working in Colombia as a teacher in several schools and universities. After years of pedagogical experiences, this would make an interesting insight, through the lens of Bourdieu, into the dominant educational pedagogical approach in a country which is perceived to be unstable by other nations. A position paper on how students may be discriminated against or oppressed because of the power struggles or tensions within the classroom and what Bourdieu might call cultural arbitraries, would make interesting reading. For this analysis, it is assumed that the theory of Pierre Bourdieu can be helpful to understand this phenomenon, since it allows to address the issue from the theoretical but also leaves the possibility of understanding the phenomenon from teaching practice and the school.

Symbolic violence and the Olympic Games: low-income youth, social legacy commitments, and urban exclusion in Olympic host cities

ABSTRACTDrawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline.

Gender on board: deconstructing the “legitimate” female director

Purpose– Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process.Design/methodology/approach– The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Québec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies.Findings– The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies.Research limitations/implications– While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies.Practical implications– Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions.Social implications– Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards.Originality/value– The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.

Social Media and Symbolic Violence

On this essay, I briefly discuss by means of a few examples how social media is used to reproduce and legitimate violent discourses, focusing on the concept of symbolic violence.

Enforcing Mobility: Spatial Mobility under the Regime of Activation

Spatial mobility is rarely investigated with a view on social policy and welfare administrations. Yet, recent activation and workfare policies have increased pressures on the unemployed, with one of these pressures concerning spatial mobility, i.e. the requirement to accept jobs that entail long commuting hours or even relocation. This paper investigates the shift towards activation in Germany, focusing on increased demands on job-seekers’ mobility, and uses a governmentality perspective, supplemented by the concept of symbolic violence, to gain insight into the strategies and practices deployed by Public Employment Service (PES) staff to produce ‘mobile selves’. It demonstrates that perceptions of (im)mobility figure prominently in the assessment not only of job-seekers’ labour market prospects but also of their character and motivation to seek work. Thus, the personal and familial implications of mobility are considered as mitigating circumstances mainly in the case of older jobless with poor labour market prospects. The majority of job-seekers, and particularly those living in regions with high unemployment, are subject to efforts on the part of PES staff to make them understand the necessity of being as mobile as possible; if such insight is found wanting, pedagogical devices are deployed to enhance job-seekers’ mobility.

Growth theory after Keynes, part II: 75 years of obstruction by the mainstream economics culture

Part I of this essay explained the sequence of events that enabled the neoclassical paradigm to regain its dominant position in mainstream economics following serious challenges by ‘Keynesian’ economists. This second essay seeks to answer the question of why the economics profession was so willing to sustain the neoclassical paradigm in the face of the reality-based challenges by ‘Keynesian’ economists like Harrod and Domar. The answer is sought in the culture of economics, the history of science in general, and the study of power in the field of political economy. This article draws heavily on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who divides culture into habitus (procedures and dispositions) and doxa (more abstract beliefs and philosophies), in order to provide insight into how culture affects economic thinking. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence helps to explain how a narrower neoclassical growth model was enthusiastically accepted as a replacement for the ‘Keynesian’ Harrod-Domar growth model. Financial and business interests clearly understood the power of culture and they used their accumulated wealth to support the neoliberal doxa and neoclassical habitus that would induce economists to willingly provide intellectual cover for policies that benefitted those financial and business interests. We conclude with a discussion on how the history of thought on economic development might have evolved if the Keynesian paradigm, and its dynamic Harrod-Domar model, had prevailed.

Teach for America and Symbolic Violence: A Bourdieuian Analysis of Education’s Next Quick-Fix

This paper seeks to analyze Teach for America (TFA) in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in an attempt to expose the ways in which this organization perpetuates structures of inequality in the existing social order. The paper begins with a general description of TFA, followed by an overview of several studies in support of and opposition to the program. Next, Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence is outlined, after which the program is analyzed in terms of the ways in which it has perpetrated symbolic violence against both corps members and TFA-taught students. This analysis suggests that TFA cannot “create the systemic changes that will help end educational inequity” because it fails to take seriously its own embeddedness within and reproduction of these inequitable structures (Teach for America 2011a, p. 1). In effect, the ways in which TFA aims to accomplish its mission reveal the hidden, violent acts against both corps members and the students whom it purports to help.

Violencia de género: el reciclaje de roles en los y las jóvenes universitarios

En este trabajo se presenta un análisis de la violencia de género en jóvenes universitarios de Aguascalientes, partiendo del concepto de violencia simbólica (Bourdieu) y la apropiación de los roles como el de proveedor y ama de casa, los cuales son en un principio negados por éstos, sin embargo los reproducen con matices de modernidad, pero finalmente sólo logran un reciclaje de los roles tradicionales. Este proceso se rescata de la propia voz de las y los jóvenes que participaron en grupos focales.

Villupuram Atrocity

This paper describes the violence against Dalits in Villupiiram in 1978, by the caste Hindus. By using the concept of symbolic violence it critically analyses the content of the Report of R. Sadasivam Commission, which was constituted by the Tamilnadu Government to enquire into the violence. It also explains how the Dalits counter the symbolic violence by preparing and publishing their own report. From the comparison of these two reports the study demonstrates how the state upholds the system of caste by supporting the views of dominant castes.

Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Environmental Pollution Science: The Case of Coal Ash Pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract: Environmental justice movements often contest environmental knowledge by engaging in scientific debates, which implies accepting the predominance of scientific discourses over alternative forms of knowledge. Using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, this paper warns that the engagement with hegemonic forms of knowledge production may reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social and environmental inequalities. The argument is developed with reference to a case study of coal ash pollution in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case study shows that the construction of knowledge in a scientific project led to the exclusion of local definitions of the situation and the dismissal of their observations of environmental pollution. The case suggests that the capacity of different actors to put forward their interpretation of an environmental issue depends on the forms of symbolic violence that emerge within hegemonic discourses of the environment.

Housing Studies, Social Class and Being Towards Dwelling

This paper offers a response to the important critiques made by Chris Allen and other scholars of housing research in the fields of housing market renewal and gentrification. The paper begins by responding to the specific interpretation and criticism made by Allen and Webb about a report co‐produced by the author of this paper. It then broadens out its focus to discuss three key themes. Firstly, it explores the distance and conflict in the conceptual frameworks of “being‐in‐the‐world” between housing research and working‐class residents. Secondly, in supporting the argument that housing research needs to understand working‐class housing consumptions on their own terms and not simply in relational terms to middle‐class housing consumptions, this paper suggests that critical researchers themselves continue to use a relational framework that essentializes and generalizes class in housing consumption. Finally, the paper briefly critiques the concept of symbolic violence and class or market hegemony in the constitution of working‐class consciousness and identity.

“Can't Tell Me Nothing”: Symbolic Violence, Education, and Kanye West

In 2004, Kanye West burst onto the music scene with The College Dropout. His follow-ups, Late Registration (2005) and Graduation (2007), continued to advance a theme critical of institutional education and the broader social distinctions it produces. By examining West's critique of higher education, this paper demonstrates how Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, defined as the ability to impose meanings while concealing their underlying power relations, is a valuable tool for analyzing discourses in hip hop and for moving beyond the hype about crime and physical violence that pervades popular debates.