Youth and Violent Performativities

Taylor

2020

Critical Sociology

The precarity and violation that has resulted from decades of neoliberal reforms have been made clear in the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in terms of access to healthcare and financial inequality. However, ideological discourses of individual heroics have been rapidly deployed, to patch up the damage done to neoliberal rhetoric. In this paper, we argue a critical sociological lens reveals something important about this violence of neoliberalism at this moment during the crisis. Analysing media articles that have considerable reach, availability and shareability, we interrogate the rhetorical framing of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and uncover three significant themes: ‘celebrating “our” heroes’, ‘personal sacrifice’ and ‘the heroes of war’. We argue that the emerging field of the sociology of violence provides the means to expose the violence of neoliberalism in the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as identify the discursive apparatus that obscure the violation of neoliberalism more generally.

Section: Definitions and Terms Usedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concluding Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

War, Heroes and Sacrifice: Masking Neoliberal Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Taylor

2020

Critical Sociology

“…This project formed part of a larger research trajectory interrogating the intersection of youth studies and the sociology of violence. This approach adopts the emancipatory knowledge hinterland from youth studies to challenge the popular association between youth and violence, as well as the assumptions within violence studies regarding the transitional nature of youth (Lohmeyer, 2020). These interviews were conducted within a project examining young people's experiences of governing violence (Lohmeyer, 2018).…”

Section: Methods and Target Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Participants in this study did occasionally experience physical and psychological harm during protests. Furthermore, as young people, they are subjected to (if not victims of) structural and cultural violence in contemporary society (Giroux, 2014;Lohmeyer, 2020;Lohmeyer and Taylor, 2021). Nonviolence is described by Butler (2020) as 'resistance to systemic forms of destruction .…”

Section: Methods and Target Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Walby (2013) argued that the sociology of violence must keep violence and power distinct. This distinction is difficult to maintain (Lohmeyer, 2020), as violence is a complex and changing phenomenon that is tricky to define (Henriksen and Bengtsson, 2018;von Holdt, 2013). For this reason, historical approaches to violence, such as Foucault's (1979) thesis that violence reduces through the process of civilisation, are insufficient as they conflate power and violence.…”

Section: Complicity To Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nonviolent youth activism and symbolic violence: Some problems in Bourdieu’s notion of victim complicity

2021

Current Sociology

Self Cite

The coupling of victim complicity with violence is intuitively objectionable, yet it is an underexamined aspect of Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’. Within sociology, the nature of violence continues to be debated and refined with contested boundaries particularly concerning non-physical forms of violence. Symbolic violence offers an avenue to investigate this realm; however, it has been both employed and rejected without close examination of the issue of complicity. Moreover, the varying interpretations of Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘violence’ present problems for sustaining sociological distinctions between power and violence. This article examines these issues through the experiences of youth activists employing Nonviolent Direct Action with a focus on their reflexive self-awareness of participation in systems of violence. The author argues that complicity in symbolic violence presents epistemological and ontological problems for the sociology of violence that can be avoided by adopting viable alternative interpretations that emphasise the subject’s reflexivity and the systemic origins of violence.

Social violence and the trivialising effects of youth in school bullying: Extended listening to South Australian young people on bullying and violence

British Educational Res J

2022

School bullying attracts significant research and resources globally, yet critical questions are being raised about the long-term impact of these efforts. There is a disconnect between young people's perspectives and the long-established psychology-based technical definitions of school bullying dominating practice and policy in Australia. This dominant paradigm has recently been described as the first paradigm of school bullying. In contrast, this paper explores the potential for reorienting school bullying research towards the concerns of young people and away from adult-derived technical definitions. Borrowing from paradigm two, which emphasises the social, cultural and philosophical (among others) elements of school bullying, in this paper, I approach bullying under the broad banner of 'social violence'. This approach addresses some of the inherent limitations of the first paradigm to conceptualise social and cultural dynamics. I argue that a 'social violence' approach reveals that the exclusionary effects of the social phenomenon of youth continue to be overlooked. Furthermore, the term 'violence' in bullying research could benefit from integrating contemporary sociological insights on this phenomenon. This paper draws on qualitative insights from a small group of young people in secondary schooling in South Australia gained through prolonged listening to peer conversations in a series of focus groups. In addition, 1:1 interviews were conducted pre and post the focus group series. I argue that these participants'