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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Violence in society > General
Individuals seek ways to repress the sense of violence within
themselves and often resort to medial channels. The hunger of the
individual for violence is a trigger for the generation of violent
content by media, owners of political power, owners of religious
power, etc. However, this content is produced considering the
individual's sensitivities. Thus, violence is aestheticized.
Aesthetics of violence appear in different fields and in different
forms. In order to analyze it, an interdisciplinary perspective is
required. The Handbook of Research on Aestheticization of Violence,
Horror, and Power brings together two different concepts that seem
incompatible-aesthetics and violence-and focuses on the basic
motives of aestheticizing and presenting violence in different
fields and genres, as well as the role of audience reception.
Seeking to reveal this togetherness with different methods,
research, analyses, and findings in different fields that include
media, urban design, art, and mythology, the book covers the
aestheticization of fear, power, and violence in such mediums as
public relations, digital games, and performance art. This
comprehensive reference is an ideal source for researchers,
academicians, and students working in the fields of media, culture,
art, politics, architecture, aesthetics, history, cultural
anthropology, and more.
Written during the Northern Ireland peace process and just before
the Good Friday Agreement, The Politics of Antagonism sets out to
answer questions such as why successive British Governments failed
to reach a power-sharing settlement in Northern Ireland and what
progress has been made with the Anglo-Irish Agreement. O'Leary and
McGarry assess these topics in the light of past historical and
social-science scholarship, in interviews of key politicians, and
in an examination of political violence since 1969. The result is a
book which points to feasible strategies for a democratic
settlement in the Northern Ireland question and which allows
today's scholars and students to analyse approaches to Northern
Ireland from the perspective of the recent past.
Law is a multi-dimensional aspect of modern society that constantly
shifts and changes over time. In recent years, the practice of
therapeutic jurisprudence has increased significantly as a valuable
discipline. Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Overcoming Violence
Against Women is a comprehensive reference source for the latest
scholarly research on the strategic role of jurisprudential
practices to benefit women and protect women's rights. Highlighting
a range of perspectives on topics such as reproductive rights,
workplace safety, and victim-offender overlap, this book is ideally
designed for academics, practitioners, policy makers, students, and
practitioners seeking research on utilizing the law as a social
force in modern times.
'Get your daughters to read this, but only after your partners and
sons have finished it' Jo Brand 'An astute and persuasive
page-turner' Observer
_____________________________________________________ Too often, we
blame women. For walking home alone at night. For not demanding a
seat at the table. For not overcoming the odds that are stacked
against them. This distracts us from the real problem: the failings
and biases of a society that was not built for women. In this
explosive book, feminist writer and activist Laura Bates exposes
the systemic prejudice at the heart of five of our key
institutions. Education Politics Media Policing Criminal justice
Combining stories with shocking evidence, Fix the System, Not the
Women is a blazing examination of sexual injustice and a rallying
cry for reform. ________________________________________________
'Powerful' Sunday Times 'I am in awe of Laura Bates . . . her
writing is nothing short of perfect' Sofie Hagen, author of Happy
Fat 'A blistering manifesto for change' Dr Pragya Agarwal 'Finish
the book furious - before rallying for the next fight' Grazia
Latest Must-Reads
Juarez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s,
and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's
most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon
that traveled from person to person, across rivers and
borders-wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place.
From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the
street, Julian Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the
words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juarez,
creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the
city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries
consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English
definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from
interviews-stories that put the terms in context and provide a
personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters,
and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs's evocative
illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein's famous
Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions
in ABCedario de Juarez both document and interpret the everyday
violence of this vital border city.
Violence is rampant in America. It is ingrained in our history and
our psychology, but what cultural similarities do high-violence
areas share? It has been a question tackled by academics and
members of the law community since the foundation of our country;
and yet, are we any closer to an answer now than we were a hundred
years ago? If we are closer, why has the crime rate steadily
increased? Reason would conclude that in recognizing the cultural
similarities of high-violence areas, we would be able to alter
these similarities and deter criminal behaviors. Even so, the
behaviors are not deterred. Crime has not lessened. Studies
continue, but nothing changes. Should we therefore give up? Or
should our hypotheses and conclusions merely change? Author Hassan
Dibich says yes to the latter. "The Subculture of Violence" takes a
close look at the psychological and cultural hypotheses of old.
Dibich delves deeply into the science of homicide and how
socioeconomic and even climactic conditions affect statistics. He
looks closely at communities with a high number of newcomers and
single parents. He goes so far as to disprove previous logic and
call for fresh research. America is being swallowed by violence. It
is time for new answers, as the old brought us no closer to peace.
Despite its ubiquity, revenge is a surprisingly understudied
subject. We're all familiar with the urge for payback, but where
does that urge come from? Why is it so hard to give up? And why can
some people only satisfy it through extreme and brutal acts? This
book addresses these questions, and by developing the concept of
radical revenge it gives some meaning to what might otherwise
appear to be senseless acts of violence. The author explores some
of the most egregious examples of radical revenge in contemporary
society, including mass shootings, internet trolling, revenge porn,
and contemporary populist politics. Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas
about shame, envy and thin-skinned narcissism, she discusses why
some people feel compelled to engage in these sorts of destructive
acts of radical revenge. She looks too at examples such as the work
of Artemisia Gentileschi and David Holthouse, to show that in
exceptional cases, revenge can be an act of creativity rather than
destruction.
Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary
white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial
times-the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil
rights era-highlighting tensions between memory and reality. Author
Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living
generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories
of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these
lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the
civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a
number of complexities-how these white southerners both
acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they
both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights
movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress
while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take
readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of
the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been
remembered, and forgotten. Digging into difficult memories and
emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of
the realities of racial inequality.
Scholars and lay persons alike routinely express concern about the
capacity of democratic publics to respond rationally to emotionally
charged issues such as crime, particularly when race and class
biases are invoked. This is especially true in the United States,
which has the highest imprisonment rate in the developed world, the
result, many argue, of too many opportunities for elected officials
to be highly responsive to public opinion. Limiting the power of
democratic publics, in this view, is an essential component of
modern governance precisely because of the risk that broad
democratic participation can encourage impulsive, irrational and
even murderous demands. These claims about panic-prone mass
publics-about the dangers of 'mob rule'-are widespread and are the
central focus of Lisa L. Miller's The Myth of Mob Rule. Are
democratic majorities easily drawn to crime as a political issue,
even when risk of violence is low? Do they support 'rational
alternatives' to wholly repressive practices, or are they
essentially the bellua multorum capitum, the "many-headed beast,"
winnowing problems of crime and violence down to inexorably harsh
retributive justice? Drawing on a comparative case study of three
countries-the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands-The Myth of Mob
Rule explores when and with what consequences crime becomes a
politically salient issue. Using extensive data from multiple
sources, the analyses reverses many of the accepted causal claims
in the literature and finds that: serious violence is an important
underlying condition for sustained public and political attention
to crime; the United States has high levels of both crime and
punishment in part because it has failed, in racially stratified
ways, to produce fundamental collective goods that insulate modern
democratic citizens from risk of violence, a consequence of a
democratic deficit, not a democratic surplus; and finally,
countries with multi-party parliamentary systems are more
responsive to mass publics than the U.S. on crime and that such
responsiveness promotes protection from a range of social risks,
including from excessive violence and state repression.
Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious
Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia
examines how law and property are constituted through violence and
social struggle.
Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large
common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists.
After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation
and dubious property adjudication. Nearly all of the huge land
grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts
or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in
New Mexico's history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land
grant, the focus of Correia's story, is one of the most
sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking
among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable
pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth
century.
Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property
conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant
violence--night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and
tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico.
The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a surprising
and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons,
Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and
undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of
his study, "Properties of Violence" provocatively suggests that
violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to
its operation.
Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of
medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern
France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It
examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses
this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban
rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The
interactions between these various forms of violence are examined
in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of
medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional
behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially
integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in
which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social
and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of
the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes
towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and
ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form
of communication which could order and harmonise society, or
whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where
meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of
ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source
material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons,
Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards,
violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning
its nature and legitimacy.
A thorough overview of violence and crime in America's schools
explores which solutions work and which don't, providing a
framework for prevention at every level. Although it is major
incidents like Columbine or Virginia Tech that grab the headlines,
everyday occurrences of bullying, harassment, and physical
intimidation in schools impact entire communities, driving kids out
of public schools and destroying faith in public education.
Preventing Violence and Crime in America's Schools: From Put-Downs
to Lock-Downs provides educators, parents, law enforcement
officials, and other youth-serving professionals with a unique
perspective on the topic of school violence. More important, it
offers solutions to the problems facing all schools when it comes
to violence and safety. Two expert authors examine specifics
relating to school violence, opportunities to prevent and
intervene, and the importance of planning for a crisis. Most other
books about school violence either highlight the research or
highlight practitioner viewpoints. This revealing book presents
both, balancing insights gained through real-world experiences with
research on best practices. The result is a fuller understanding of
the problem-understanding that will enable solutions. 7 tables, 3
figures Bibliography
The United States is not post-racial, despite claims otherwise. The
days of lynching have been replaced with a pernicious modern racism
and race-based violence equally strong and more difficult to
untangle. This violence too often results in the killing of Black
Americans, particularly males. While society may believe we have
transcended race, contemporary history tells another story with the
recent killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and
others. While their deaths are tragic, the greater tragedy is that
incidents making the news are only a fraction of the assault on
communities of color in. This volume takes seriously the need for
concentrated and powerful dialogue to emerge in the wake of these
murders that illuminates the assault in a powerful and provocative
way. Through a series of essays, written by leading and emerging
academics in the field of race studies, the short "conversations"
in this collection challenge readers to contemplate the myth of
post-raciality, and the real nature of the assaults on communities
of color. The essays in this volume, all under 2000 words, cut to
the heart of the matter using current assaults as points of
departure and is relevant to education, sociology, law, social
work, and criminology.
"Gender and Violence in the Middle East" argues that violence is
fundamental to the functioning of the patriarchal gender structure
that governs daily life in Middle Eastern societies. Ghanim
contends that the inherent violence of gender relations in the
Middle East feeds the authoritarianism and political violence that
plague public life in the region. In this societal sense, men as
well as women may be said to be victims of the structural violence
inherent in Middle Eastern gender relations. The author shows that
the varieties of physical violence against women for which the
Middle East is notorious--honor killings, obligatory beatings,
female genital mutilation--are merely eruptions of an ethos of
psychological violence and the threat of physical violence that
pervades gender relations in the Middle East.
Ghanim documents and analyzes the complementary roles of both
sexes in sustaining the system of violence and oppressive control
that regulates gender relations in Middle Eastern societies. He
reveals that women are not only victims of violence but welcome the
opportunity to become perpetrators of violence in the married
female life cycle of subordination followed by domination. The
mother-in-law plays a crucial role in supporting the structure of
patriarchal control by stoking tensions with her daughter-in-law
and provoking her son to commit sanctioned violence on his wife.
The author applies his deep analysis of gender and violence in the
Middle East to illuminate the motivational profiles of male and
female political suicidalists from the Middle East and the
martyrological adulation that they are accorded in Middle Eastern
societies.
It was over a decade ago that experimental psychologists and
media-effects researchers declared the debate on the effects of
violent video gaming as "essentially over," referring to the way
violence in videogames increases aggressive thoughts, feelings and
behaviors in players. Despite the decisive tone of this statement,
neither the presence nor popularity of digital games has since
diminished, with games continuing to attract new generations of
players to experience its technological advancements in the
narration of violence and its techniques of depiction. Drawing on
new insights achieved from research located at an intersection
between humanities, social and computer sciences, Gareth Schott's
addition to the Approaches in Digital Game Studies series
interrogates the nature and meaning of the "violence" encountered
and experienced by game players. In focusing on the various ways
"violence" is mediated by both the rule system and the semiotic
layer of games, the aim is to draw out the distinctiveness of
games' exploitation of violence or violent themes. An important if
not canonical text in the debates about video games and violence,
Violent Games constitutes an essential book for those wishing to
make sense of the experience offered by games as technological,
aesthetic, and communicational phenomena in the context of issues
of media regulation and the classification of game content "as"
violence.
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