Moral Shock Research Articles

A Terminological History of the Acadian Tragedy

ABSTRACT In his book A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), historian John Mack Faragher explains that the 1755–63 Acadian deportation can be termed “ethnic cleansing,” following contemporary United Nations and scholarly usage of the expression. In this paper, instead of addressing the terms of contemporary UN or scholarship, as Faragher does, to see which terms can be used for the Acadian tragedy, I provide a terminological history of the Acadian tragedy. This terminological history studies the terms used for the Acadian tragedy since the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century and shows how they recur in the mid-twentieth century discussions on genocide. First, I investigate Edmund Burke’s treatment of the Acadian tragedy seen as resulting from acts of destroying, rooting out, and extirpating, and the Abbot Raynal using terms for the tragedy such as embarking, transporting, driving away (later deporting), destroying, perishing, depopulating, and, indirectly, crime against humanity. I also focus on the nineteenth-century account of the Acadian tragedy by Catherine Reed Williams, who expanded Raynal with notions of barbarity, banishment, expulsion, extermination, and moral shock, and on others after her who brought terms for Acadians such as annihilation, atrocity, evacuation, and clearing. Second, I highlight Acadian memory in the 1950s genocide debate in Washington (DC) and how the terminological history of the Acadian tragedy appears in a document Raphael Lemkin had on Acadians. I also explain how Lemkin, unknowingly or not, rearticulated in publications and texts and found in his research the terms already used for Acadians as he addressed his genocide concept.

The Moral Shock of the War in Ukraine and the Mobilization of World Resources in the Light of the Philosophy of Mind

The relevance of the article lies in the need to study the moral side of war and the mobilization of world resources in the context of educational philosophy. In the context of metaphysics, war has an anti-materialistic, spiritual meaning and is "a certain test for the nation", which can be a manifestation of artificial intelligence. It is during war that society fights for the highest principles of civilization, not for the state or its ambitious aspirations. Both war and heroic experience can awaken deep forces connected to the foundations of race. On the contrary, materialists, especially Marxists, saw the cause of wars solely in social-class inequality and the antagonistic confrontation "between labor and capital." At the same time, war in society is not just a phenomenon of armed struggle guided by politics, a way of achieving one's goals with the use of armed violence. It is followed by a change in the course of numerous social processes and the involvement of economic, ideological and other forces of society in the struggle. War tests the economic and organizational strength of every nation. Therefore, it is important to understand the war as provoking a moral shock in Ukraine and mobilizing world resources in the light of the philosophy of reason. Its impact on social development is associated with a significant disruption and change in the usual functions and nature of the existence of elements of this or that social organization.

Emotional reflexivity in the animal justice politics of sight: embodied moral shock and limit of the emotional repertoire

Farm occupation is a recent tactic and enacts a politics of sight, which makes visible hidden animal violence by the animal industry complex. Animal justice citizen activists (AJCAs) identify and enter farms to protest lawful violence against animals by documenting and sharing images from the inside. This article examines activists’ subjective experience of immersion in animal violence. The analysis shows that a politics of sight requires and introduces extreme, conflicting emotional demands on AJCAs, requiring a level of emotional reflexivity and negotiation that is sufficiently grasped by existing conceptions of emotional habitus and moral shock. The empirical study seeks to contribute to filling this gap. To do so, I investigated the role of emotional reflexivity during, and after, AJCAs’ bodily immersion in the context of animal violence. The latter is also at its core of an unexpected moral shock for which there is not an established emotional repertoire among AJCAs. Thus, I explored the conflictual tension and the emotional consequences that AJCAs must manage during and after immersion in animal violence.

Moral Shock and Trans ‘Worlds’ of Sense

Abstract This paper has two aims: to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and the way it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society and also, more specifically, to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant ‘world’ normatively defines trans individuals out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale's recent work on moral shock, arguing that moral shock needs to be contextualized to ‘worlds’ of sense to understand how marginalized people affectively experience shocking events. My focus is the trans experience of moral shock due to the way trans people are positioned outside of dominant society, which creates the conditions to experience cyclical, chronic shock. These affective conditions point to a collective responsibility to ease the affective stress that the most marginalized experience.

Political emotions in violent contexts: do moral shocks influence activism?

ABSTRACT Feelings of injustice and political engagement are often connected, sometimes unquestioningly; the idea being that one generates the other along a sort of continuum. This article examines the links that surface between moral feelings – as a specific form of political emotional experience – and engagement, starting with a decentring of current Western democratic contexts and a shift towards coercive or authoritarian contexts, using field research from the Middle East. Clearly, the emotional intensification linked to violent political experiences must be taken into account, but this emotional intensification does not alone establish any necessary continuity between the shock of certain experiences, a feeling of injustice, and engagement. Activist articulations of a feeling of injustice are in fact three-layered: expression of a feeling fed by lived or transmitted experiences, a reference to ideological frameworks that both legitimise their forms of engagement and help give meaning to their situation, and inscription within a general moral argument.

Reimagining medical sustainability: The role of symbolic visuals against plastic waste

The global healthcare sector, while pivotal to economies, inadvertently leads to significant medical waste generation, an issue amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study, grounded in emotion-symbolic work, examines the impact of visual attributes on healthcare professionals’ attitudes toward medical waste, especially medical plastics. Focusing on visual clutter, the presence of human faces, and animals in imagery, this study aims to determine the potency of these elements in eliciting moral shocks and emotional responses. Moreover, the influence of target actors, encompassing connecting to a cause, collective identity, and non-profit organizations promoting green healthcare, is explored as a moderating variable. Inspired by emotion-symbolic work, this study seeks to discern the potential of symbolic visuals in driving behavioral shifts among healthcare professionals, underscoring the intertwined nature of patient care and environmental health in addressing the pressing challenge of medical waste management. We further offer actionable insights to healthcare institutions and activists, enabling them to craft impactful campaigns that resonate deeply with their audience, fostering a greener and more responsible healthcare paradigm.

Shocked or Satiated? Managing Moral Shocks Beyond the Recruitment Stage

Abstract Sociologists James Jasper and Jane Poulsen have argued that activists’ deployment of emotionally triggering ‘moral shocks’ can stimulate recruitment for movements, particularly for those which are less successful in recruiting through social networks. Others have suggested that, more than a recruitment tool, these moral shocks are useful for sustaining activist motivation. This study, however, explores the tendency of activists to disengage from moral shocks as a means of managing emotions such as compassion fatigue, burnout and psychological distress. Although many respondents see the utility in moral shocks as an outreach tool, they carefully consider their own exposure to protect their emotional well-being and protest sustainability. Results are based on an email-based qualitative interview with twenty-five newly recruited activists and established activists in the Western Nonhuman Animal rights movement.

‘Love is over, this is going to be Turkey!’: cathartic resonance between the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil

ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of why and how a protest can inspire individuals in distant countries. Taking the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil as cases, it investigates the reasons why the Turkish protests were framed as one of the inspirational benchmarks by some Brazilian protesters. Drawing on grounded theory applied to the interviews with Brazilian protesters and qualitative secondary data, this study introduces the concept of ‘cathartic resonance’ as a mechanism of cross-national diffusion of protests and social movements. According to this mechanism, the moral shocks triggered by a foreign but relatable struggle may have an accelerating influence on sympathizers’ motivation for engaging in a similar struggle in their own context even in the absence of geographical, cultural, historical or organizational ties between the countries. Exploring the experiences, perceptions and emotions of protesters, this study proposes a more refined and extended understanding of diffusion by integrating the emotional and cognitive responses of individuals from an agentic and cultural approach.

Migranter der blev aktivister: Prodemokratisk mobilisering blandt russiske migranter i Danmark og Norge

Abstract: Migrants turned activists: Pro-democratic mobilisation amongst Russian migrants in Denmark and NorwayThis article explores how emotions and group solidarity influence collective action. Through case study of Russian migrants’ engagement in pro-democratic transnational activism in Denmark and Norway, this article contributes to our understanding of emotions and their role in mobilising and demobilising collective action. The study is based on ethnographic research material consisting of semi-structured individual interviews with Russian activists in Norway (4) and Denmark (7). The analysis show that the role of emotions is two-fold. On the one hand, mobilising emotions, moral shock, and in-group interactions can increase group solidarities and recurring participation. The findings suggest that participation in transnational activism can be considered a strategy that helps the activists cope with sudden and traumatic political developments in their homeland. Interestingly, the study suggests that even emotions usually considered demobilising, such as fear, have the potential to strengthen group solidarity and thereby act as a mobilising factor. On the other hand, demobilising emotions and threats can weaken in-group dynamics and lead to demobilisation.

Pride and Protest: Horizontal and Vertical Emotional Response in the Aftermath of the 2019 Chilean Spring

A large body of literature has shown that emotions can motivate collective action. Nevertheless, the effect that collective actions could have on emotion has been less researched. This study examined the effect of protests on bystanders’ pride, using the case of the 2019 “Chilean Spring.” Our findings indicate that a set of indicators of pride, representing the country, the status quo, and the social structures, were negatively affected by the crisis, which suggests vertical emotional response. Protests’ frame signaled that not everything in the country was as thought, generating a moral shock that affected shared emotions about the country. However, pride toward fellow citizens was positively affected. Some of these effects are stronger for people with an intermediate educational level. These findings contribute to the literature on the impact of protests showing that unexpected, loosely organized, and massive movements can trigger generalized emotions.

The COVID-19 pandemic and ethical stock markets: further evidence of moral shock

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is twofold. First, we assess the evolution of stock returns for two classes of ethical investments—Islamic and sustainable funds—from September 2001–January 2021. This is the first study of the financial performance of ethical investments in a period covering technological (the dot-com bubble in 2000), financial (the 2008 financial crisis), and healthcare shocks (the COVID-19). Second, we analyze the dynamics of the financial returns of conventional and ethical ethnic markets in the COVID-19 context and model the impact of COVID-19 news. We perform different time-varying tests to apprehend market reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. We present two interesting results. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a time-varying impact on the stock market. Basically, a close to zero effect at the early stage of the pandemic, followed by a negative and significant effect during the first wave from March 2020 to June 2020, was observed. However, this has since been attenuated owing to social restriction measures, teleworking, government stimulus policies, and massive vaccine rollouts. Second, among all markets, the Islamic stock market is the most resilient and least impacted by the pandemic, suggesting evidence of a new moral shock.

L’arte contemporanea e il “civic engagement”

This essay explores the value of the artist’s action and the power that his work exercises in the socio-political history of his country. It talks about Picasso and his Guernica, offering a reading of the work following the thread of Antonio Banfi’s aesthetics through the critical look of Dino Formaggio. The scene opens with the parisian Expo of 1937. The article is then integrated with aesthetic, moral and civil contents that guide the reader to understand the concept of morality, crisis and life of the art for Banfi and the connection with Picasso's cultural work, starting from his writings against Franco’s atrocities up to Guernica. An authentic reading of the work is inserted that wants to support the moral shock determined by Guernica: a real denunciation of the misery and corruption of the government, inciting the people to fight. Finally, in order to show how current the artists’ interest in social, political and international problems is, the essay ends by presenting the work of two particularly committed contemporary artists: the Italian Paola Ravasio and the Syrian Tammam Azzam.

Moral Shock

AbstractThis paper defends an account of moral shock as an emotional response to intensely bewildering events that are also of moral significance. This theory stands in contrast to the common view that shock is a form of intense surprise. On the standard model of surprise, surprise is an emotional response to events that violated one's expectations. But I show that we can be morally shocked by events that confirm our expectations. What makes an event shocking is not that it violated one's expectations, but that the content of the event is intensely bewildering (and bewildering events are often, but not always, contrary to our expectations). What causes moral shock is, I argue, our lack of emotional preparedness for the event. And I show that, despite the relative lack of attention to shock in the philosophical literature, the emotion is significant to moral, social, and political life.

Combatting medical plastic waste through visual elicitation: Insights from healthcare professionals

In spite of the focus on improving treatment methods and determining the economic and environmental impacts of medical waste management, little research has been conducted to understand consumer perceptions of medical waste reduction. In healthcare setting, our research seeks to address this urgent need by investigating how visual cues can be used to elicit healthcare professionals' willingness to reduce medical plastics. By employing the vignette-based experimental method, we collected data from 1,139 healthcare professionals to examine how visual characteristics (i.e., visual clutter, colorfulness, the presence of human face, the presence of animal) in images of medical plastic pollution were used to arouse moral shock and emotional energy in healthcare professionals. The results of our study suggest that visual displays should be cluttered, colorful, and characterized by human presence. By displaying these visuals in an image of anti-plastic pollution, healthcare professionals are most likely to express their sadness, rage, and despair, and enhance their intention to refuse medical plastics to the fullest extent. By contrast to the previous study, we found that healthcare professionals’ moral shock and willingness to refuse medical plastics were not significantly impacted by the presence of animals on the images.

The October 2019 Protest Movement in Iraq. An Analysis of the 'Early Moments' of the Mobilisation

On 1 October 2019, a wide-ranging anti-government protest took to the streets in Baghdad. Grievances included unemployment, a lack of basic services, the absence of social justice, and endemic corruption in political and economic institutions. Despite swift and severe state repression, the protest snowballed into a countrywide mobilisation encompassing the central-southern governorates to become the largest protest movement to challenge Iraq's post-2003 political order. By granting analytical weight to the role of early riser activists, this paper focuses on the factors that shaped activists' decisions and lead to different forms of spontaneous participation involving both sympathisers and bystanders. In so doing, it draws attention to the non-hierarchical structure of the movement and its diffused communication strategy, the repression as a moral shock and the rhetoric of protest slogans. At the crossroads between social movement studies and Iraqi studies, this article contributes to both bodies of scholarship with empirical research. On one hand, it enriches social movement literature by shedding light on strategies and actions adopted by activists operating in non-liberal contexts. On the other hand, it enriches Iraqi political studies by demonstrating that the country hosts a vibrant sphere of contentious politics, a sphere that deserves ample scrutiny.

#AllforJan: How Twitter Users in Europe Reacted to the Murder of Ján Kuciak—Revealing Spatiotemporal Patterns through Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling

Social media platforms such as Twitter are considered a new mediator of collective action, in which various forms of civil movements unite around public posts, often using a common hashtag, thereby strengthening the movements. After 26 February 2018, the #AllforJan hashtag spread across the web when Ján Kuciak, a young journalist investigating corruption in Slovakia, and his fiancée were killed. The murder caused moral shock and mass protests in Slovakia and in several other European countries, as well. This paper investigates how this murder, and its follow-up events, were discussed on Twitter, in Europe, from 26 February to 15 March 2018. Our investigations, including spatiotemporal and sentiment analyses, combined with topic modeling, were conducted to comprehensively understand the trends and identify potential underlying factors in the escalation of the events. After a thorough data pre-processing including the extraction of spatial information from the users’ profile and the translation of non-English tweets, we clustered European countries based on the temporal patterns of tweeting activity in the analysis period and investigated how the sentiments of the tweets and the discussed topics varied over time in these clusters. Using this approach, we found that tweeting activity resonates not only with specific follow-up events, such as the funeral or the resignation of the Prime Minister, but in some cases, also with the political narrative of a given country affecting the course of discussions. Therefore, we argue that Twitter data serves as a unique and useful source of information for the analysis of such civil movements, as the analysis can reveal important patterns in terms of spatiotemporal and sentimental aspects, which may also help to understand protest escalation over space and time.

Challenging Harmony to Save Nature? Environmental Activism and Ethics in Taiwan and Japan

To save nature, environmental activists in Taiwan and Japan are willing to change their behavior and society itself, challenging “harmony” in their communities. This paper explores the tension between globally relevant environmental activism and localized cultural traditions. A wide-encompassing understanding of environmental activism is proposed, based on a tentative typology of different positions regarding environmental sustainability. This paper follows some environmental activists’ journey to moral protest, through semi-structured interviews and participatory observation conducted between 2015 and 2019. It then discusses the results in light of some traditions of thought in Taiwan and Japan. Interviewees often tell about an event in their life that triggered a moral shock and exacerbated their feeling of urgency. Activists’ sense of purpose motivates them to navigate psychological and social obstacles such as social disapproval and exclusion. They also tend to build a “community of activism” through social media to support each other and develop strategies.

ART AND TRAUMA

Presentation of articles from issue 33 of Revista Cena, a publication on the interrelationships between art and trauma. Trauma is understood as a wound, violence, defeat, disaster, psychological shock, emotional shock, suffering, agony. These and other derived concepts are of interest to a cultural arc that spans concerns from psychoanalysis to sociology, including manifestations of all the arts and the theory that is made about or from them. It also implies the response that can be given to anxiety. The year 2020 brought medical, socioeconomic and emotional confrontation to the world against the sanitary constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, from social isolation to losses of any kind and their contingencies. On all continents, anxiety continued its course, accompanied by the necessary symbolic support – to which the arts, communication and creativity programmatically contributed – but not finding it fully when interdicted by the ethical and moral shock caused by denial and the behaviors considered diversionary or antisocial. From the Plague of Athens to the fratricidal conflicts of the present, from the sacred texts to the post-apocalyptic imagery in cultural products, from the self to the other, art was made and is present, spontaneous or induced, building worlds.

Symbolizing Destruction

Emotions can play an important role in the perception of grievances, yet we know little about how environmentalists strategically utilize emotions to bolster activism and garner support. Drawing on social movement and environmental sociological research, we analyze how moral shocks can be used to mobilize activists against environmentally destructive activities. We study the case of Libkovice, Czech Republic, where environmentalists battled against the coal industry to save a city from being razed to access coal reserves. The data come from in-depth interviews, organizational and documentary video, and archival documents. Findings indicate that environmentalists drew upon symbols of destruction, such as threats to the local church, to fuel anger and mobilize the campaign. Results show how symbolic environmental campaigns can serve as beacons for future protest.

"Say It Loud, Say It Clear…": Concerting Solidarity in the Canadian Refugees Welcome Movement (2015-2016).

The Canadian Refugees Welcome Movement (2015-2016) was one of the most sizeable, visible, and effective instances of collective action in recent Canadian history. It had a nationwide scope and grassroots initiation. It comprised a wide variety of participants and actively employed social media in its constitution. This article reports the results of a multimethod case study that seeks to explain how collective action frames emerged in the context of the Canadian Refugees Welcome Movement; which actors were involved in their articulation; and how they generated a following, collective action and humanitarian and political effect. The focus is on the discursive processes of construction of solidarity across difference as they unfolded in the social media environment. The Facebook event pages calling for rallies in support of Syrian refugees, it argues, served as a discursive space that helped transform the moral shock experienced by members of distinct moral communities into a process of concerting of voices and construction of solidarity and collective action frames across differences.