CFP: Call for Papers - Violence(s)

CALL FOR PAPERS

for a special issue of “Open Cultural Studies” 

VIOLENCE(S)    

“Open Cultural Studies” (www.degruyter.com/CULTURE) invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Violence(s)”, edited by Carolina Borda (NHS Scotland) and Cristina Basso.  

Classic definitions of violence in social sciences have influenced anthropologists' work but have also been contested through ethnographic scholarship. Foucault’s is perhaps one of contemporary social theory's most encompassing definitions (Foucault, 1982). From this perspective, violence is understood as a primitive and last resource form of power that imposes actions over others (bodies and things) who cannot resist them. It refers to the realm of control, whilst power is defined as an act that influences the actions of others (who have at least a certain degree of capacity to resist) and pertains to the realm of governmentality (Ibid). Foucault’s concern was for the constitution of subjects through knowledge and power in public discourse (Gros, 2012), but not much of a theoretical concern around the creation of meaning and experience. From a different standpoint, anthropologists have explored the origins, meanings and place of violence (Riches, 1986) in constituting sociality, namely, the process of relating to others through action or ‘the relational matrix that constitutes the life of persons’ (Strathern et al., 1996, p. 53).  

In anthropology, violence has been studied as a culturally defined concept whose central component would seem (or sought to be) universal. Riches, for example, defined it as the performance through which performer, victim and witness engage in acts deemed violent in a particular cultural setting (1986). Violence would be performative in nature. At the same time, Riches suggested the risks of relying solely on universal definitions that project folk understandings of the concept onto symbolic “others”. He also warned of the dangers of understanding violence through folk definitions that ignore questions of power by harmonising and idealising the communities anthropologists engage with in their research. Violence has also been considered a boundary separating physical force exerted by the state and other actors (Radcliffe-Brown, 1950). However, Weber defined the state as the body that successfully claims the monopoly of violence (Anter, 2020) and as the means of politics (Weber, 2010), not something exterior to it. Anthropological scholarship on violence has focused on issues such as gender (Wies & Haldane, 2011; Abraham,  2000; Counts and Campbell, 1992), war (Haas, 1990;  Mikkel & Hastrup, 2010; Richards & Bernhard, 2005; Das, 2007; Stroeken, 2012), politics (Spencer, 2007; Kelly, 2010; Hinton, 2002;  Chatterji & Deepak, 2007), policies (Weis J, Haldane, 2011), embodiment (Berry et al., 2017;  Pfister & Encinosa, 2021; Olujic, 1998; Green et al., 1998; Linos, 2010) and structural inequality (Alcalde, 2010; Segato, 2003; Pipyrou & Sorge, 2021). David Riches's seminal work on the anthropology of violence (1986) has inspired some of the scholarship produced in the last decades, including the idea of violence as an actor-based perspective on social order, where the categories of strategy and meaning have a central place, so do willingness and acceptability (or the unwillingness and forced acceptability on victims and witnesses). For Riches and those who followed his model, violence will be almost always recognised for what “it is” amongst those who perform, experience, and witness it (Ibid).  

However, as recent literature has shown, violence as a category, as studied in previous years, might fall short in explaining issues related to the complexity of forms of contestation of the legitimate use of physical force (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2003), the existence of discourses that legitimise forms of control without a clear strategy in place, the exertion of acts, by those categorised as “victims”, that could be deemed as “violent” in a given social context (Musa, 2918), the ambiguity of experiences of victims/survivors which cannot be equalled to plain “acceptability” or “unwillingness” (Borda-Niño, 2019; Wolf, 1992), the lack of opportunity for anticipation (or tactics, as Riches understood them) of the actions of others (Hanson and Richards, 2019), the place of the embodied experience, not as a side effect of (physical) violence, but as its primary locus even in non-physical forms of violence (Hanson and Richards, 2019), the use of legitimate physical force that is illegal in the eyes of a state but justified for those who claim rights to the legitimate exercise of violence outwith the state or in conjunction with it (Shah, 2016), the naming of forms of action as violence different from physical harm (Hanson and Richards, 2019;  Lemelson and Tucker, 2021), etc. Violence, as proposed by Veena Das, is a highly contested concept and should be assessed as a mechanism that enables the creation and dissolution of realities (2008: 284). Starting from the premise that consent is imposed or parodied in establishing a sexual social contract, the author argues that many forms of violence are masked, and, therefore, the legitimacy of labelling certain practices as violence itself is disputed and is an effect of power relations. According to Das, through such disputes, violence does not come to an end; it only gets redistributed in the forms of modern political organisation (286).  

We wonder, then, what concepts, relations, and methodologies within social sciences could help us account for dynamics, relations, and experiences that the existing mainstream academic paradigms of violence did not have on their radar. Whose perspectives, ways of knowing, experiencing, and explaining what could or could not be called violence should we bring into the discussion?  

The proposed special issue will explore new issues and debates in three dimensions of the anthropology of violence. Firstly, the objects of study; secondly, the concepts, theories and ethical frameworks that frame the construction of the object of study; thirdly, the methodologies that allow for the study of these new objects.  

We invite submissions of original research papers from scholars in Cultural Studies, Film and the Visual Arts, Performance Studies, Media Studies, Literary and Translation Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Migration Studies, Humanitarian Studies, among others, that engage with the notion of violence. Potential  subjects and approaches include but are not limited to:  

• * Violence and technology/technocracy, violence within contemporary techno-capitalism and the political economy of securocratic capitalism: militarised policing, weapons of scrutinisation, techno-aided apartheid and militarised urbanism; hi-tech and smart weapons, militarised and smart intelligence, military applications of emergent technologies (NBIC, GNR and others).
• 
  
  
•  Theorising fascism(s) and totalitarianism in the 21st century: convergence of authoritarianism, biosecurity and scientism.
  
  
•  Philanthrocapitalism and the imposition of totalitarian ideas.
  
  
•  Data extraction, radical behaviourism and commodification of life/relationships.
  
  
•  New forms of censorship and repression of dissent, cancel culture.
  
  
•  Consumption of gamified and spectacularized violence, overload of information and moral disengagement.
  
  
•  Re-elaborations and transformations of Primo Levi’s “grey zone” and Arendt’s “banality of evil”.
  
  
•  Re-discovering the traditions, the hidden histories and the subterranean legacies of the oppressed: luddites, commoners, maroons, folk heroes, bandits, cunning men and women, “White boys” and “Right boys”-style rioters and conspirers, popular mystics and heretics.
  
  
•  Debt, forced indebtment and new servitudes. Finance as a war machine. Pastoral control, poverty, destruction of lives/livelihoods/ relational networks and indebtment, restructuring of class relationships within techno-capitalism.
  
  
•  Multiple consequences of lockdowns, social distancing and COVID-19 pandemic management. Pandemic policies, acceleration/continuity of global trends and hastening/concealment of socio-economic collapse.
  
  
•  Current cycles/episodes/architecture of land-grabbing, organised and globalised theft, commercial schemes and occult economies, new enclosures (of land, bodies, “cultures”), (neo-) colonialism and total extractivism, re-organisation and technical upgrade of accumulation processes and practices, destruction of human economies and related/integrated ecosystems, annihilation and dismantling of the collective dimensions of human existence.
  
  
•  Unsettling procedures/routines of science and biomedicine, medicalised violence, pathologization/medicalisation of life, forced medical procedures, obstetrical violence, the commodification of body parts and remains, disabilities and institutional/medical violence.
  
  
•  Violence, education, and pedagogical practices. “Black/Poisonous Pedagogy” (as in Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädagogik), dispossession, capitalist realism, and despair-inducing techniques within the schooling system. Symbolic/ epistemological violence and education.
  
  
•  Narrative violence: linguistic and narrative strategies of denial, ridicule, suppression of subversive/alternative accounts, testimonies and stories, linguistic devices for the avoidance of responsibility and the suppression of the difference between victim and perpetrators. Mystification of violence through the use of academic and hyper-specialised/technical jargon. Imposition of victimhood identity through academic and non-academic moral discourses, e.g. sex work.
  
  
•  Multidisciplinary focus on trauma and traumatic memories. Transgenerational effects of trauma and multigenerational character of suffering. Traumatic experiences and bonding processes. Trauma and collective/cultural fragmentation and disembodiment.
  
  
•  Evil/violence/destruction and the mythical/supernatural/ beings and entities of folklore and legends: leviathans, worldeaters, wendigos, zombies, devils, evil tricksters, neo-Promethean characters, amongst others. Exploring human hybris through the phantasmagorical and the occult. Zombie institutions, ghosts, ruins, haunted and ruined places, terror and memory.

   


HOW TO SUBMIT  

Submissions will be collected by January 31, 2025 via the online submission system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/culture/  

Choose “Research Article: Violence(s)” as the article type.

Before submission, authors should carefully read the Instructions for Authors, available at https://www.degruyter.com/publication/journal_key/CULTURE/downloadAsset/CULTURE_Instruction%20for%20Authors.pdf

All contributions will undergo critical peer review before being accepted for publication.


As a general rule, publication costs should be covered by Article Publishing Charges (APC); that is, be defrayed by the authors, their affiliated institutions, funders or sponsors. Authors without access to publishing funds are encouraged to discuss potential discounts or waivers with the journal’s Managing Editor, Katarzyna Tempczyk ([email protected]), before submitting their manuscript.  

Further questions about this thematic issue can be sent to Carolina Borda([email protected]) and Cristina Basso ([email protected]). In case of technical problems with submission, please write to [email protected]   


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