Discussion Of Violence Research Articles

Policing Potential Violence

A series of Supreme Court decisions in the past 40 years transformed the legal standard for police use of force, centering officers’ assessments of a suspect’s potential for violence. Using the oral arguments from three landmark SCOTUS cases, I trace the development of a legal discourse of potential violence. Using Judith Butler and Robert Gooding-Williams’ frame of a “racial field of vision,” this paper juxtaposes the colorblind legal narrative of potential violence with cultural narratives of race that mark Black masculinity with the signifiers of threat and criminality. I argue that the intersection of legal and cultural narratives of potential violence is an important site for understanding the disproportionate use of police violence against Black men and boys.

The scenography of entertainment in journalistic discourse

The newspaper is a discursive practice that aims to impart information to individuals, with a heavy burden of responsibility. Its pages contain news and reports about the different subjects of everyday social life, but there is a certain predisposition in news about violent incidents. Nonetheless, across all forms of media, it is possible to encounter a transgression of the genre’s characteristics. Given that problem, we seek to understand how journalistic discourse is presented as a scenography of the discourse of entertainment, pervaded by the discourse of violence. Moreover, we attempt to analyze how the strategies of journalistic discourse enable the construction of that scenography. To this end, we draw on the theoretical assumptions of Dominique Maingueneau (2008), Muchembled (2012), Michaud (1989) and Cano (2012) to achieve our objectives. We thus hope to contribute to discussions in the area of discourse analysis, particularly those on journalistic discourse. We understand that the strategies used by the newspaper enable an interaction with entertainment and that a subtle violence pervades this relationship. As a result, the reading public is not only informed about world affairs but also consumes violence and entertainment, through the scenography that is constructed.

RATOVI I GRADOVI U ROMANU MATIJASA ENARA „ZONA“

The paper examines war discourse, globalization and intensification of violence in the 20th and 21st century, though the research of the whole issue is placed in the context of the archetypal experience of war and war chaos in literature known since Homer’s Iliad, on which Énard insists in this contemporary epic. Since the protagonist, the grandson of the Ustasha collaborator with Maks Luburić, took part in the war in the former Yugoslavia, the question of inheriting and perpetuating evil, hatred and destruction arises. The conflicts in the Balkans are being re-examined, especially the period from the First World War onwards, however, this is not the only chronotope of this novel. Through an imaginary journey across the Zone (a hallmark for the Mediterranean basin), through the stream of consciousness and the memory of Francis Servain Mirković, the narration maps the cities that at some point in the history were also a scene of conflicts and crises – Beirut, Baghdad, Barcelona, Algeria...

Framing Social Work Discourses of Violence Against Women. Insights From Finland and India

Violence against women (VAW) is a global social problem. In India, its high prevalence is connected to gender inequality, whereas Finland suffers from the so-called Nordic Paradox—that is, the existence of both gender equality and a high prevalence of VAW. This qualitative study employed a critical constructioniist approach and frame analysis to analyze data from interviews with Finnish ( n = 20) and Mumbai ( n = 18) social workers. We asked how social workers frame their response to VAW and how ways of framing elucidate institutional practices that facilitate the interventions. Anti-oppressive, juridical, procedural, and collaborational frames revealed institutional practices mirroring how societal dismissal of VAW and neglect of survivors’ experiences travel across cultures. However, in contrast to Mumbai, ways of framing in Finland revealed little evidence of a feminist approach to VAW. Although gender as a social category might not have stood out in the Finnish data, there was evidence of how gender works through ethnicity. Findings raise questions for both countries about how to develop VAW interventions, for example, to address the complexity of VAW affecting individuals, families, and communities, engage different stakeholders, and attend to social positionality as well as axes of diversity.

Anti-Black Racial Violence and Popular Culture in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

With #saytheirnames, the 2020 Black Lives Matters movement implores the national public to etch the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor into their consciousness. The fight for racial justice is a fight for attention in American popular culture. Activists push for recognition of the right to Black life, celebrities attempt to shine their spotlights on justice initiatives, and public figures debate solutions to systemic racism. The immediacy of today’s racial violence discourse parallels that of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The Online Intersection among Islamophobia, Populism, and Hate Speech: An Italian Perspective

Abstract Online radical Islam is a topic widely studied by scholars and notoriously discussed among non- experts as well (Awan, 2007; Von Behr et al. 2013; Gray & Head 2009). Because of its intrinsic characteristics (i.e. accessibility, anonymity, or users’ identity dissimulation), the internet has always been a useful tool for propagandists of Islamic fundamentalism (Fighel, 2007; Stenersen, 2008; Koehler, 2014). However, in the last decade, studies have questioned the real importance and magnitude of Islamic radicalization online (Gill et al., 2017). In fact, while scholars were focused on observing digital Islamic radicalization, a galaxy of new forms of extremism was growing online (Silva et al., 2017; Roversi, 2008) that no longer made Islam an exceptional case study. Today, Muslim people are one of the groups most aggressively targeted by extremist, intolerant, violent, and radical discourses (Elahi & Khan, 2017; Amnesty International, 2019). Anti-Muslim hate speech has spread online throughout Europe and the United States, reinforced by the propaganda and political discourse of populist right-wing parties (Hafez, 2014; Bakali 2016). This paper introduces some large-scale action-research projects developed in Europe and Italy in the last three years (2016–2019) and aims to reconstruct the most updated Islamophobia state of the art in terms of numbers, characteristics, and phenomenology from the offline to the online context.

Buddhist Challenges to the Contemporary Ethical Discourse of Violence versus Nonviolence

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Humanizing the Rohingya Beyond Victimization

This article is based on interviews with U Ashin Wirathu and an analysis of Buddhist nationalist discourses of violence against religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar. I explore a fundamental issue that continues to plague the Rohingya—the emphasis on the Rohingya as victims of nationalist systemic Buddhist violence. This chapter sets out to bring Rohingya agency to the forefront. Rohingyas are characterized as immutably foreign and Muslim—that is, they are labeled with an identity convenient to state-sangha oppression. Through interviews with relocated Rohingya society members and the mentoring of Dr. Jerryson, this work is dedicated to the rehumanization and devictimization of the Rohingya.

Confession, psychology and the shaping of subjectivity through interviews with victims of female-perpetrated sexual violence.

Female-perpetrated sexual abuse (FSA) is often seen as rare and of little consequence. Confessing to being a victim of FSA is infrequent and often met with incredulity. Identifying as such a victim is thus often a response to an incitement to speak in the mode of confession. Interviews producing the possibility for such confessions were conducted with ten self-identified South African FSA victims and then analysed using a Foucauldian approach. In identifying as victims of FSA the participants drew on psychologised, gendered accounts of damage reflected in trauma, revictimisation, memory loss, the cycle of abuse and deviance. An analysis of these accounts demonstrates how confessional sites, such as the (psychological) interview, anchor victim worthiness in damage so that ‘non-normative’ victims of violence are able to see themselves in sexual violence discourse as forever compromised subjects whose healing requires rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality, and violence in contemporary South Africa.

The necropolitics of neoliberal state response to the Covid-19 pandemic in India

We draw from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in India to outline that the neoliberal consolidation of the state is enabled by precariousness, violence, and inequality in overlapping planes of marginality. The pandemic showed the abysmal state of public health institutions in India as people experienced an erosion of dignity in both life and death. The harsh and sudden lockdown announced by the Indian state rendered workers jobless, hungry, exhausted, and on the borders of death. Instead of providing social security to workers, the state embarked on a neoliberal agenda of deregulation, weakening job security, and collective bargaining legislation. The state enacted a violent discourse of Hindu nationalism to blame Muslims for the spread of the pandemic in India to deflect attention from its abdication of responsibility in making healthcare and social security available to vulnerable segments of the Indian population. The neoliberal policy response of the state during the pandemic was embedded in the necropolitics of protecting the middle class and elite lives while directing structural violence against the working class and Muslims, making their lives disposable.

Memes, Radicalisation, and the Promotion of Violence on Chan Sites

A number of violent far-right attacks in recent years have revealed an apparent connection with `chan culture', not just in the tangible examples of attackers uploading manifestos, final messages and livestreams to chan sites themselves, but in the widespread community support exhibited in some corners of this online subculture where violence is both trivialised and glorified. Commonly, this is manifested in the visual culture present on chan sites, particularly memes, which may be used to promote extreme or even violent narratives under the guise of humour and irony. This paper seeks to understand how the visual culture of chan sites contribute to, and/or encourage violent discourse. In particular, we combine quantitative data scraping, ethnography and visual analysis across tens of chan sites ranging in popularity like 4chan, 8kun, or neinchan between March -- June 2020. Over all we collect a dataset of 135K images across different chans and provide first qualitivative characterization of the most popular images shared across different chans.

DOMESTIC VIOLANCE AGAINST WOMEN: DISCOURSE OF REALITY

The article deals with the problem of domestic violence against women and assesses the expression of this phenomenon in the context of a society approach. The statistical construct of this phenomenon confirms the assumption that the establishment of legal fundamentals for protection against violence is linked to a process of changing the society approach to this issue. The analysis of theoretical and legal discourse of domestic violence reveals that the consistent implementation of the strategy of legal protection of victims against domestic violence has enabled the creation of a specialized comprehensive assistance infrastructure system throughout the country, which provides access to appropriate medical, psychological, legal assistance and at the same time entitles the society to develop prevention programmes that help to establish intolerance towards violence. The Republic of Lithuania Law on Protection against Domestic Violence (2011) has laid strong foundations for the establishment of specialized assistance centres and implies the development of necessary infrastructure. KEYWORDS: , , .

Legitimation of hate and political violence through memetic images: the Bolsonaro campaign

The federal elections were held in Brazil in 2018. The ballot resulted in a victory for the far-right candidate, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. The question that arose after the victory of the far-right was: How could this have happened? One of the instruments that undoubtedly contributed to this unexpected victory was a peculiar aspect of his political campaign: memetic communication. Through the use of memes in the social media (above all WhatsApp), Bolsonaro’s project transformed these violent discourses against political opponents, feminism, racialised persons and poverty into a series of discourses legitimised through humour and irony. It was a simplification through the memes affecting the static system of cognitive and metaphorical frameworks. During the pre-election period in 2018, we carried out digital ethnographic research in the WhatsApp groups of supporters of Bolsonaro’s project (“Bolsonarism”). In this period, we collected a sample of 132 memes belonging to WhatsApp groups composed of up to 256 members, who did not know each other and were geographically dispersed. The analysis we carried out demonstrates the trivialisation and legitimisation of violence against political opponents and other social groups. Much of this legitimisation was camouflaged under the mask of supposed humour and irony, which in reality was insulting, prejudicial and dehumanising.

Discourses of Gender and Political Violence in South Africa

Abstract Politically violent women are regularly muted or made exceptional. Yet, underplaying women’s involvement in political violence obscures the systemic nature of such violence. We employ a discursive psychology analysis of an in-depth interview with a South African woman who has been involved in decades of political activism, and identified two discourses: Gendering Politically Violent Symbols and Enactments, where political violence was wielded as a symbol, and Gendering Political Organizing, wherein feminist agencies were directed against political structures. Together, these discourses indicate how gender identity is simultaneously consistent and at odds with political identity and how gender intersects with political violence.

The violence of odors: sensory politics of caste in a leather tannery

ABSTRACT Leather is a sensuous object marked by complex affects of desire and disgust. In India, this disgust is amplified due to the association of leather with caste. This paper examines the leather tannery as a space produced through the sensuous discourse of caste violence, which functions by marking leatherworking bodies with odors, that in turn perpetuate affectual and material possibilities of humiliation and discrimination. This violence of odors has no place in the deodorized discourse of law and yet in the sensuous ordering of caste there is nothing more repulsive than to carry the stench of tannery on oneself. The paper examines this intangible and sensual character of caste violence by closely following Paul Stoller’s methodological argument that sensuousness forms the field on which phenomena play out and through which they can be understood. Keeping in mind the value-laden and subjective nature of sensuousness, the paper also reflects on the ways in which the sensory politics of caste frames the interactions between the field and the body of the researcher – both of which are determined by the norms of caste. The ethnographic descriptions of caste and violence in the tannery on which this paper is based are thus mediated by multiple sensorial perceptions, including those of the researcher.

Public pedagogy on sexual violence: A feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs after #MeToo

In this article, we report findings from a feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs in which women and girls discuss and narrate their experiences of sexual violence. The analysis yielded three discourses and three counterdiscourses: the refusal discourse and the complicating consent counterdiscourse; the deviant perpetrator discourse and the community problem counterdiscourse; and the not that bad discourse and truth telling counterdiscourse. Our findings indicate that the YouTube vloggers simultaneously reproduce and resist dominant sexual violence discourses; they use both dominant and counterdiscourses to understand, situate, and make sense of their experiences of sexual violence. Counterdiscourses were constituted when vloggers resisted dominant discourses by pointing out their inconsistencies and fundamental flaws and presented alternative patterns of meaning. The #MeToo movement and YouTube’s nature as a narrative platform allowed the women and girls in our study to locate their stories of sexual violence within broader contexts and connect them to a continuum of experiences and a complex cultural problem. In a post-#MeToo world, the vloggers’ narratives evidenced their development of a digital networked feminist consciousness. Situated within feminist understandings of sexual violence and prevention education, as well as the emerging research on the #MeToo movement, this study contributes to the literature on public sexual violence pedagogy.

Looking in the mirror: the global '68 through the Brazilian daily press

PurposeThis article explains the process of construction and configuration of the Brazilian social imaginary on the global '68 using the daily press as source material.Design/methodology/approachIt looks at the narratives conveyed by the press about the condition, situation, motivations, aspirations and capacity for action of young university students. The analysis is focused mainly on the usage of totalitarian language and permits an in-depth view of the reality of life in Brazil at the time and the role played by the students in the resistance to the dictatorship. It also includes an analysis of how other students' protests of 1968 – in Poland and Mexico – were portrayed through the media, and how they helped to shape the collective imaginary about Brazilian university students, situating it in a conjuncture of broader dimensions and connections.FindingsThe youth of Brazil, Poland and Mexico were represented as active political and social subjects, capable of defying, and sometimes profoundly upsetting, the established order. Violence and the discourse of violence were constant unifying elements in the narratives created by the daily press. This helped generate an image of university students which portrayed them as a rebellious, revolutionary and/or subversive sector of the population, responsible for one of the most extensive and profound social and political crises which those countries had experienced in decades.Originality/valueThis is the first study of the Brazilian reception of the '68 Polish and Mexican students' protest and its implications for the social narrative of students' resistance in Brazil.

Inocencia quebrantada. El uso de lo grotesco en Pelea de Gallos de María Fernanda Ampuero.

Few years ago, María Fernanda Ampuero came suddenly to the literary world, standing out in Latin America and even in the United States with her anthology of stories Pelea de gallos. This paper starts with the concept of “dispositio”: the order of ideas in a rhetorical discourse, which has —also— been used by literary studies to refer to the sequence in narrative, or the specific accommodation that exists in an anthology. In this way, Ampuero’s book has a discourse of maturity, violence and aging. In the same way, the grotesque is an element that resonates strongly in these texts, so that, we can know the intensity of the criticisms of: machismo, misogyny and contempt for another human being have through uses of metaphors or descriptions. This work generates links from story to story and ends up developing a social complaint established throughout the book.

As Wives Too Beat Husbands: Another Look at the Socio-Legal Narratives of Domestic Violence

In the conventional human rights, socio-legal and related discourse of domestic violence, focus has preponderantly been on men as the perpetrators, with wives or women as victims. This may be due to some factors. One is the entrenched empathy and solidarity with women as the “weaker sex” and usual victims. In such context, instances of women’s acts of domestic violence tend to be perceived readily as “exceptional cases” where the women perpetrators “must have been pushed to the wall”. Another possible factor is the mind-set to readily assume that wife-on-husband violence is “unlikely” or “improbable”, based on gender differences in size and strength, coupled with the man being the domineering personality and “head” in conventional spousal heterosexual relationships. A third factor may be that women can readily and comfortably speak out about their experiences as victims of domestic violence with expectations of societal interventions. Conversely, due to ego or masculine dignity male victims of domestic violence may keep silent, thus leaving, mainly, the voices of women resonating as victims in the pertinent narratives. However, studies, on a notable scale, are showing the reality of males being victims of domestic violence perpetrated by females. This paper seeks to address the foregoing and related issues in the context of human rights and similar aspects. Among the issues to be engaged will the factors contributory to the muffling of the voices of male victims and need for a pragmatic balance in the protection of women and men against domestic violence.

Proximal or peripheral: temporality and spatiality in young people's discourses on gender violence in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article explores how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how violence, gender, space and time are co-constructed in this discourse. We found that young people display an ambivalent attitude to violence, reinforcing several contradictory discourses of violence. Young people adopt various understandings that place violence differently in time (ongoing vs. past) and space (distant/absent vs. close/present). They discursively construct the school as a non-violent space while considering digital spaces to be violent. Yet, they still find that violence occurs at different places and times at school. These ‘discursive manoeuvres’ highlight how views on violence that territorialises and re-territorialises places as being ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ is part of the gendered spatial regulation of young people's lives. By specifically analysing time and space in young people's discourse on violence, this article contributes to research on their perspectives on gendered violence.