State-sanctioned Violence Research Articles

Why DON'T We "Say Her Name"? An Intersectional Model of the Invisibility of Police Violence Against Black Women and Girls.

Racialized police violence is a profound form of systemic oppression affecting Black Americans, yet the narratives surrounding police brutality have disproportionately centered on Black men and boys, overshadowing the victimization of Black women and girls. In 2014, the #SayHerName campaign emerged to bring attention to the often-overlooked instances of police brutality against Black women and girls, including incidents of both nonsexual and sexual violence. Despite these efforts, mainstream discourse and psychological scholarship on police violence continue to marginalize the experiences of Black women and girls. This raises a critical question: Why DON'T we "Say Her Name"? This article employs intersectional frameworks to demonstrate how the historic and systemic factors that render Black women and girls particularly vulnerable to police violence also deny their legitimacy as victims, perpetuate their invisibility, and increase their susceptibility to state-sanctioned violence. We extend models of intersectional invisibility by arguing that ideologies related to age, in addition to racial and gender identities, contribute to their marginalization. Finally, we reflect on how psychological researchers can play a pivotal role in dismantling the invisibility of Black women and girls through scientific efforts and advocacy.

Reviewing Concentrated Poverty Literature Through an Antiblackness Lens to Reveal a Concentrated Debt

The relationship between concentrated poverty and educational outcomes has received substantial attention in academic research over the last 3 decades. Researchers have argued that neighborhood characteristics are associated with academic achievement, educational attainment, dropout rates, college entry, cognitive abilities, attendance, and grade repetition. Given that Black students constitute a large proportion of those living in concentrated poverty, coupled with the urgency of contemporary times where state-sanctioned violence is on full display in the United States, assessing how education scholars are conceptualizing concentrated poverty is vital. Utilizing an antiblackness lens to critically review 64 recent articles addressing concentrated poverty and educational outcomes, we explicitly drew on anti-Black scholarship to expand the discourse from “concentrated poverty” to a “concentrated debt.” A concentrated debt constitutes education, racial capital, placemaking, and humanity debts. We argue that to address these debts, we must move beyond deficits, lacks, and disorganization of Black neighborhoods and toward humanizing Black students and their families by investing in their homes, schools, and communities.

Polish Mother and (Not) Her Children: Intersectional State-Violence against Minors in Poland

This article seeks to explain the political responsibility that Polish right-wing female politicians directly associated with the 2015–2023 Polish government and the then-ruling Law and Justice Party bear in the state-sanctioned violence against minors in the context of LGBT- and immigration-related issues. Its main assumption is that, in times of the nationalist surge that has been sweeping Poland, women using anti-LGBT and anti-immigration discourses helped to legitimize discriminatory state practices and, consequently, made a significant contribution to the enactment of white, Christian, and heteronormative identity on Polish children. Drawing upon Critical Discourse Analysis, this work examines the anti-LGBT and anti-immigration political talk by female politicians who, in their narrative strategies, adopt the position of a “Polish mother” on a mission to save a “child in danger”. Through my analysis, I aim to demonstrate that anti-LGBT and anti-immigration discourses are equally significant areas of women’s political engagement. Despite the prevalent cultural norms of caring motherhood, women do exercise their agency in political struggles as supporters of discriminatory state policies directed against minors by re-politicizing a symbolic figure of the “Polish mother”.

“Invisible Deaths”: A Critical Analysis of the Study of Prison Homicide

Prison homicide, or homicides that occur between individuals who are incarcerated, has received a dearth of attention in scholarly literature. These homicides have increased over the past several decades with devastating consequences for those housed within prison walls, correctional and administrative staff, the families of those incarcerated, and the communities from which they are removed. Perpetrators of prison homicides often continue to engage in violence despite incapacitation, calling into question the ability of the state to house individuals safely. When fatal violence occurs, victims of these homicides are constructed as deserving of violence. Drawing from critical criminological perspectives of state-sanctioned violence, I argue that treatment of these victims affects the legitimacy of the criminal justice system and public safety.

Documenting Cold War Truth: Human Rights Abuses and Spiritual Death in the USSR and the US

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet activists in the USSR and members of the Black Panther Party in the United States emphasized the need to document the truth of domestic human rights abuses not in the land of the Cold War adversary but in their own. In the process, they contested the dominant misrepresentations of Soviet citizens and African Americans that obscured those routine human rights abuses. Members of both groups conceived of documenting this truth as essential to ultimately eliminating these domestic forms of state-sanctioned violence. They also spoke of the act of speaking the truth in word and deed as facilitating their own liberation from what they similarly identified as a devastating Soviet and American spiritual death in countries that were officially represented in the Cold War universe as the moral antithesis. The ‘woke’ or liberated individual was no longer a subservient, mask-wearing ‘Homo Sovieticus’ or ‘Negro’ who mouthed the lies of unbounded Soviet democracy and American freedom, but a genuine citizen and full human being who demanded respect for their human rights.

Violent transitions: towards a political ecology of coal and hydropower in India

ABSTRACT The concept of just transition is often defined as a process of including particular kinds of fossil fuel workers in the transition towards low-carbon energy. Missing from such liberal framings of just transitions is an engagement with how the extraction of both fossil fuels and low-carbon energy is contingent upon state violence and the expropriation of Indigenous and frontline communities’ lands. In contrast to liberal framings of just transition that focus on the inclusion of fossil fuel workers as stakeholders, this article calls for an investigation of ‘violent transitions’, which refers to the ways in which the expansion of fossil fuel and low-carbon energy infrastructures are predicated upon direct state-sanctioned violence – including the criminalization of dissent, protests, and mass mobilization through police violence and arrests – to facilitate processes of land expropriation. Drawing upon a comparative analysis of 121 coal and hydropower projects in India, the article argues that both coal and hydropower energy transitions are characterized by significant state-sanctioned violence. Such historical injustices must be redressed and repaired in India’s emergent just transition policy frameworks.

Heritage, resistance and dissonance: reconstructing Pentridge in a prison tourism theme park

ABSTRACT Pentridge Prison was established in 1851 in the Melbourne outer suburb of Coburg in the state of Victoria, Australia. Decommissioned in 1999, the site is marked by 150 years of white colonial violence, trauma, incarceration and death. Twenty-four years on, it has been repurposed to include a mix of residential and commercial developments. More recently, Art Processors have been contracted by the developers to curate new Pentridge tours and visitor experiences. This article will observe how the institutional histories of Pentridge have been curated and represented through the on-site redevelopments and tours. Autoethnographic methods are deployed to document representations of social memory at the site. The framework of hauntology assists to elucidate the affective consequences of erasing landscapes marked by trauma and state-sanctioned violence. The result is a site defined by a deep sense of dissonance, where attempts to memorialise traumatic events, violence and death, are undermined by proximity to what can only be characterised as a prison tourism theme park. Ultimately, Pentridge Prison highlights the highly political process of repurposing penal sites and memorialising difficult histories carry profound implications for addressing contemporary injustices associated with imprisonment.

Sectarianism as racism: the collective punishment of Alevi communities in Turkey

Drawing on the case of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination against Alevis, a historically stigmatised and persecuted ethnosectarian community in Turkey, this article shows that sectarian identities can also be raced. The case of Alevis in Turkey not only indicates how sectarianism can function as a form of racism but also offers an example of the connection between the production of race and the politics of death. Approaching racism as a punitive mechanism and form of collective punishment that punishes racialised communities at different levels and that constantly reminds them of the possibility of what Gilmore terms ‘premature death’, the article offers a new and nuanced understanding of the multiple modalities of racism in Turkey. Rather than viewing racism in Turkey as merely an imitative form of European racism, this article shows that racism in Turkey is also informed by the country’s own imperial past. Turkey provides fertile ground for examining both western and non-western forms of racism and the intersections between the two.

Bodies that Persist

This essay by Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, co-editor of the Special Focus section “Chilean Film and Media: Fifty Years Later (1973/2023),” discusses the nonfiction responses to the 2019 estallido social (social uprising) as part of a longer history of documentary resistance. Ramírez-Soto argues postdictatorship Chilean documentary oscillates between an emphasis on the bodies of the direct victims of state-sanctioned violence and an emphasis on the bodies of the films themselves as haptic images. Focusing on the work of the anonymous group Colectivo Cinematográfico Pedro Chaskel (CCPCH), one of the many collectives that took to the streets to document the popular revolt in 2019, Ramírez-Soto reveals how through the recycling of militant documentaries, these films establish a link with the past and with its images of resistance.

“Ain’t I a woman?”: a historical and contemporary analysis of state-sanctioned violence against Black Women in the United States

ABSTRACT Alarming statistics show that Black women in the United States (US) are disproportionately more likely to be killed by the police, and more likely to die during childbirth than their counterparts. However, despite growing attention to incidents of police killings and pregnancy-related deaths of Black women, there has been minimal effort to historically situate these inequities in the contexts of state-sanctioned violence. Coverage of these deadly medical and law enforcement encounters remain limited in mainstream media – reinforcing the lack of concern and institutional protection for Black women. This article examines the current plight of police violence and reproductive harm against Black women in the US, and contextualize these racial and gendered disparities using a Black Feminist Thought perspective. The authors provide implications for maternal health, law enforcement, and mass media to expose and eradicate state-sanctioned violence against Black women. Future research is needed to interrogate and expand the concept of state-sanctioned violence.

“Use your common sense to navigate, and you're gonna get along okay”: Exploring the sensorial politics of attunement, survival, and resistance in Canadian federal prisons

What does prison feel like? This question has generated a theoretically and epistemologically innovative body of literature known as sensory criminology. However, due to the bureaucratic barriers that researchers experience in trying to access prison spaces and incarcerated people, much of this literature is written about/from the privileged experiences of prison ethnographers, undoubtedly missing many of the sensory nuances of prison life. To collapse the distance, and to prioritize the value of the sensory from the perspective of incarcerated people, we use qualitative data gleaned from 57 semi-structured interviews with former federally incarcerated people in Canada to examine the sensory dynamics of prison life as they are grounded in lived experiences. To concentrate our discussion, we focus analytic attention on the sensorial politics of survival and resistance, highlighting how incarcerated people must first become affectively and sensorially attuned to the prison environment to survive and resist the state-sanctioned violence of incarceration. After contextualizing our project – Feeling the Carceral – we analyze what incarcerated people describe as the shocking and tumultuous process of affective attunement to the prison environment. Next, we demonstrate how incarcerated people use their sensory interpretations of prison spaces to both protect themselves from, and resist, state-sanctioned violence, ultimately questioning the ethics and usefulness of carceral intervention. Specifically, we contend that attending to the ways incarcerated people sensorially decipher and interpret the prison environment not only demonstrates the intelligence and resourcefulness of criminalized people, but it also reveals more subtle, yet nonetheless totalizing, forms of prison violence that have been previously overlooked in the literature.

Gendered state violence and post-coup migration out of Turkey

Through a study of migration patterns out of Turkey since 2016, this paper examines how state-sponsored gendered violence contributes to international migration. While gender-based violence is acknowledged as a critical driver of migration, existing scholarship generally focuses on domestic violence and violence by non-state actors. This paper examines how gendered violence perpetrated or encouraged by the state can force migration. While women in Turkey have long experienced shifting approaches to women's rights, after the July 2016 coup attempt, state-led and state-sanctioned violence intensified and became visible as a tool to repress alleged dissidents, minorities, and LGBTQ individuals. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with recent migrants and an analysis of news articles and reports by international governmental and non-governmental organisations, the paper identifies gendered forms of violence perpetrated by the Turkish state that lead to decisions to migrate. In doing so, the paper draws attention to the role of state-sponsored gender-based violence as a cause of human mobility.

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Critical Race Theory: A Tool to Promote an Anti-Racist Pedagogy

There has been much controversy surrounding critical race theory (CRT) and the discussion of race and racism in education. The national emergence of racial injustices such as state-sanctioned violence, police killings of people of color, schools’ pipeline to prison, and COVID-19 racial disparities, in addition to racial justice movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackAndMissing has ignited the need for the social work profession to bring awareness to the pervasiveness of race and to fully acknowledge the role of white supremacy on education, social systems, institutions, legal systems, and culture. This article highlights the need for social work education to develop anti-racist education and practice and increase awareness of white supremacy in the United States. In addition, this article suggests the value of infusing CRT as an anti-racist pedagogy and tool to teach race, actively oppose racism, and organize social change.

Nurses as Disciplinary Agents of the State: Ethical Practice and Mandatory Reporting in the United States.

This article reviews legislative initiatives that mandate nurses to report patients, families, and clinicians to law enforcement. Most recently, these laws target transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth and people seeking abortion. In this article, we examine the ethics of such laws through professional ethical codes. Furthermore, through a biopolitical lens, we critically analyze examples of nurses' participation in complying with laws that harm patients. Finally, we discuss the damage these laws have on the nursing profession and assert the necessity of a resituating of professional ethics that considers the complexity of nursing care amidst increasingly blatant state-sanctioned violence.

Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children. By Silvia RodriguezVega (ed.) NYU Press, 2023 Paperback 9 781 479 810 451, 240 pp, $30.00

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the US child population. The complex and nuanced manner in which immigrant children's lives are shaped by issues of legal status, citizenship, state-sanctioned violence and belonging should be of great interest to educators, policymakers and researchers in the US and across the world. However, little attention is given in literature to impact of specific immigration policies on young people's development and socialisation. Perhaps that's because it's a time expensive task and one that requires a deep understanding of child-centred research. Into this gap steps Silvia Rodriguez Vega with her new book, Drawing Deportation. Built on 10 years of work with immigrant children in Arizona and California, she analysed 300 drawings, theatre performances and family interviews to engage with accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. Through children's drawings and stories Rodriguez Vega exposes the destructive consequences of legal violence, structural racism and lack of safety in these young people's lives. Even though they may have been born in the US or may have US citizenship, they still feel endangered if they have one undocumented parent whose status dictates the way family can live their lives. A young participant in the study, Sergio ‘states that in Arizona, just looking Mexican is enough reason to be arrested and detained or deported via racial profiling’ (p. 75). On holidays and special occasions, immigrant families often stay home because they can be easily pulled over for a routine check at alcohol checkpoints, which can then lead to interrogation about status and potential deportation. The artwork shows that children are highly aware of this risk. The book includes multiple examples of what sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (2011) called ‘everyday bordering and politics of belonging’. The ‘technologies of everyday bordering’ are in place to supposedly ‘make people feel safe by keeping those who do not belong out’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018, p. 230). Drawing by a participant in the study, Sandra from Arizona (figure 3.4 in the book) shows an acute representation of the border by a young person. A short dialogue between the two characters is depicted in two word-bubbles. As ‘an authority’ character points to the border, the smaller character says, “But I'm a citizen”; the authority replies, “you look Mexican.” Sandra underlined the words “citizen” and “look” in red. ‘Linking these words communicates the difference between being a citizen and looking like one’ explains Rodriguez Vega (p. 80). In my view, the drawing also shows the omnipotence of de- and re-bordering that involve displacement, relocation of borders and border controls, influence these young people's everyday lives by challenging their sense of belonging, disabling their feeling of safety and raising their sense of precarity. Further, Rodriguez Vega argues that children understand and internalise violence, racism, hate and death and may mirror back what they experience in their lives. In the environment marked by destruction and dehumanisation, violence becomes cyclical and children can become powerful messengers and reproducers of hate. But she counters this possibility by showing children as agents of their own stories who reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. In her work, she is clearly inspired by notable educators such as Paulo Freire, to demonstrate how art can be a healing praxis ‘for children to calm their fears and explore positive solutions’ (p. 117). Her book results in an explicit message to transform schooling and teacher's training in super-diverse societies such as the US or the UK where more non-traditional, art-based methods of teaching, civic education, social-justice-oriented learning and culturally relevant curricula are needed. My final point from across the Atlantic is to observe growing research that conveys experiences of migrant children and youth in contexts of the Global South and North, which is increasingly published by international journals in the field demonstrating that these young people's views are becoming recognised as relevant to mainstream academic developments. Connecting to the large volume of scholarship that exists in the interdisciplinary area of migrant childhood and youth studies beyond the United States would have made Rodriguez Vega's contribution more universal and recognisable as it is a fascinating, timely and beautifully written book that speaks beyond its context.

The Gradual and Immediate Violence of an Engineered Conflict: School Closings, Public Housing, Law Enforcement, and the Future of Black Life in Chicago

Background/Context: This article considers violence, both structurally and interpersonally, in Chicago, a city that moves to isolate and contain many of its Black working-class/low-income/no-income residents. Violence (particularly death by gun violence) should never be understood as a singular social problem that requires unilateral decisions on how to address the issue. Instead, it is critical to understand that homicides and other forms of violence are often the outcomes of conflict exacerbated by planned scarcity and abandonment (engineered conflict). In short, we should consider these conflicts as largely engineered by the state, declaring some Chicago residents to be of value along the lines of race, class, gender, age, (dis)ability, and sexual orientation, while others are deemed disposable. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Instead of the deficit narrative of crazed, pathological criminals roaming the streets, another conversation pushes us to understand violence beyond the acts that result in bodily harm or death, and begin to consider the structural conditions that increase the chances of a violent act taking place. For these reasons, this article contemplates the following questions: What pushes people to be in conflict with each other while remaining reluctant to strike back at the system that has largely engineered the conditions of marginalization, isolation, and containment? More important, for those who have decided to resist, what are they doing to address the situation while building new realities for themselves and the people they care about? Research Design: The design of the study is qualitative, utilizing archival and current data on school closings, the destruction of public housing, and law enforcement. Utilizing conceptual design, the study positions engineered conflict as a material and ideological process with the goal of rendering certain Black communities in Chicago disposable. Conclusions/Recommendations: Instead of ending with the adage that “there’s nothing we can do about it,” we should understand that people who find state-sanctioned violence to be unacceptable are operating in ways that are proactive and compelling. Local organizations throughout the city have created their own unique processes in developing strategies to address affordable housing, quality education, and public safety. Their consideration of fugitive possibilities (strategies that are not based in commonplace policy solutions offered by the state) and actions is critical in a city that attempts to enforce a logic of disposability on their humanity.

A Method to the Madness: Applying an Intersectional Analysis of Structural Oppression and Power in HCI and Design

With increased focus on historically excluded populations, there have been recent calls for HCI research methods to more adequately acknowledge and address the historical context of racism, sexism, gendered racism, epistemic violence, classism, and so on. In this article, we utilize Black feminist epistemologies to serve as critical frameworks for understanding the historical context that reveals the interconnected systems of power that mutually influence one another to create unequal outcomes or social inequalities for different populations. Leveraging Black feminist thought (BFT) and intersectionality as critical social theories of design praxis, we introduce intersectional analysis of power—a method that enables HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to identify and situate saturated sites of violence in a historical context and to transform the ways in which they engage with populations that have been historically oppressed. Engaging in self-reflection as researchers, we apply an intersectional analysis of power to co-design technologies with community street outreach workers who address violence in their predominantly Black communities. We: (1) identify the saturated site of violence; (2) identify the intersecting systems of power and who holds power (past and present); (3) describe the “conceptual glue” that binds these intersecting systems together and the assumption(s) that those who hold power are employing to guide their interactions; (4) examine the ways in which Black people are subjugated, surveilled, and/or expected to assimilate to “normative” ways of being and behaving; and (5) identify acts of resistance. This article contributes an alternative to traditional HCI and design methods that falsely perpetuate a lens of neutrality and colorblindness that centers on whiteness, innovation, and capitalism and ignores the history of State-sanctioned violence and structural oppression.

Lush aftermath: Race, labor, and landscape in the suburb

This article takes up labor and landscape in the wake of war in an unlikely place: an agricultural suburb of Greater Miami. In Homestead, Indigenous Maya migrants displaced during and after scorched earth counterinsurgency work in ornamental plant and palm nurseries, filling U.S. subdivisions and yards with verdant plant life. These flourishing plants produce and stabilize suburban property regimes across the country. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nursery workers and owners, community organizers, and suburban developers, this article asks: what grows after war? I show how the entanglement of state-sanctioned violence, racialization, and property produces a lucrative and injurious environmental order that emerges after war’s formal end—what I call a lush aftermath. Thinking collaboratively with migrant justice movements, this conception of a lush aftermath illuminates how domestic landscapes are transnationally produced through inner and outer wars of U.S. empire.

A critical examination of policies and practices impacting the education of unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States

Beginning in 2014, increasing numbers of unaccompanied immigrant children (UIC) arrived and were apprehended at the United States-Mexico border. These children were fleeing violence, poverty, environmental disasters, as well as state-sanctioned violence and political instability influenced by interventions and support from the U.S. government spanning several decades. The purpose of this article was to examine the factors that shape the educational experiences of UIC in the United States during and after detention. The following questions guided this analysis: (1) What policies and practices impact the education of apprehended UIC in the United States? (2) What are the conditions formerly apprehended UIC encounter in schools? A review of the literature between 2000 and 2022 was conducted, including peer-reviewed articles, commentaries, legal documents, and news articles. The literature raises concerns about the quality, effectiveness, and availability of academic resources for these children. This review demonstrates the need for additional research and policy changes aimed at improving the educational conditions of UIC in shelters and communities after reunification, and it offers recommendations to school districts, policymakers, and researchers on how to best address the academic and non-academic needs of formerly apprehended UIC in the United States.