Constructions of Victimhood

Constructions of Victimhood

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  • Author: David Clarke
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISBN: 3030048047
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 315

The post-war Federal Republic of Germany faced the task of addressing the plight of the victims of state socialism under the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and in the German Democratic Republic, many of whom fled to the west. These victims were not passive objects of the West German state’s policy, but organized themselves into associations that fought for recognition of their contribution to the fight against communism. After German unification, the task of commemorating and compensating these victims continued under entirely new political circumstances, yet also in the context of global trends in memory politics and transitional justice that give priority to addressing the fate of victims of non-democratic regimes. Constructions of Victimhood: Remembering the Victims of State Socialism in Germany draws on the constructivist systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to analyze the role of victims organizations, the political system, and historians and heritage professionals in the struggle over the memory of suffering under state socialism, from the Cold War to the present day. The book argues that the identity and social role of victims has undergone a process of constant renegotiation in this period, offering an innovative theoretical framework for understanding how restorative measures are formulated to address the situation of victims. As such, it offers not only insights into a neglected aspect of post-war German history, but also contributes to the ongoing academic debate about the role of victims in process of transitional justice and the politics of memory.


Betraying the Event

Betraying the Event

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  • Author: Fatima Festić
  • Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • ISBN: 1527561259
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 225

In gaining an instrumental part, becoming a fashion, the victimhood theme has drawn attention to its fascinatory and manipulative aspects, and has asked for a critical reconsideration. This volume makes note of an attempt to sustain a conversation about changes in the ways the processes of victimization are written out and comprehended. The contributors aim to expose some recent instances and modalities of cultural and political constructions of victimhood in various parts of the world. Our concern with the overlapping areas of victimhood and rhetoric points to the ambiguous manner in which language and images thread their way into the critical discourses of today, and even devise a vicious reversal of the victimized/victimizer positions. Although we ask: can the victim’s real ever be fully represented?, we keep holding on the simple assurance that only an attempt at representation of the real in an actual performance can bring us closer to the victimizing event, make us grasp its other contested constructions and foresee the materiality of the effects of its linguistic implications. We try to suggest a comparative approach that would link different experiences of victimization, possibly enabling a cognitive exchange, and emphasize the necessity of raising the writers’ and readers’ awareness of the narrative consequences of victimizing processes and the policies following on from them.


The Politics of Victimhood in Post-conflict Societies

The Politics of Victimhood in Post-conflict Societies

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  • Author: Vincent Druliolle
  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
  • ISBN: 9783030099374
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 329

This volume sheds new light upon the role of victims in the aftermath of violence. Victims are central actors in transitional justice, the politics of memory and conflict resolution, yet the analysis of their mobilisation and political influence in these processes has been neglected. After introducing and explaining the reasons for this limited interest, the book’s chapters focus on a range of settings and draw on different disciplines to offer insights into the interrelated themes of victimhood – victims, their individual and collective identities, and their role in and impact upon post-conflict societies – and the politics of victimhood – meaning how victimhood is defined, negotiated and contested, both socially and politically. Because it outlines a stimulating research agenda and challenges the view that victims are passive or apolitical, this interdisciplinary volume is a significant contribution to the literature and will be of interest to scholars from disciplines such as law, anthropology, political science, human rights, international studies, and to practitioners.


The Rise of Victimhood Culture

The Rise of Victimhood Culture

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  • Author: Bradley Campbell
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISBN: 3319703293
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 301

The Rise of Victimhood Culture offers a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at U.S. universities, which have bled into society at large. These are not the familiar clashes between liberals and conservatives or the religious and the secular: instead, they are clashes between a new moral culture—victimhood culture—and a more traditional culture of dignity. Even as students increasingly demand trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” many young people are quick to police the words and deeds of others, who in turn claim that political correctness has run amok. Interestingly, members of both camps often consider themselves victims of the other. In tracking the rise of victimhood culture, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning help to decode an often dizzying cultural milieu, from campus riots over conservative speakers and debates around free speech to the election of Donald Trump.


The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood

The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood

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  • Author: Johanna Ray Vollhardt
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • ISBN: 0190875194
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 471

"This book provides an overview of current social psychological scholarship on collective victimhood. Drawing on different contexts of collective victimization-such as due to genocide, war, ethnic or religious conflict, racism, colonization, Islamophobia, the caste system, and other forms of direct and structural collective violence-this edited volume presents theoretical ideas and empirical findings concerning the psychological experience of being targeted by collective violence in the past or present. Specifically, the book addresses questions such as: How are experiences of collective victimization passed down in groups and understood by those who did not experience the violence personally? How do people cope with and make sense of collective victimization of their group? How do the different perceptions of collective victimization feed into positive versus hostile relations with other groups? How does group-based power shape these processes? Who is included in or excluded from the category of "victims", and what are the psychological consequences of such denial versus acknowledgment? Which individual psychological processes such as needs or personality traits shape people's responses to collective victimization? What are the ethical challenges of researching collective victimization, especially when these experiences are recent and/or politically contested? This edited volume offers different theoretical perspectives on these questions, and shows the importance of examining both individual and structural influences on the psychological experience of collective victimhood-including attention to power structures, history, and other aspects of the social and political context that help explain the diversity in experiences of and responses to collective victimization"--


Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse

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  • Author: Sherianne Kramer
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1315453592
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 247

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is a groundbreaking study into gender, sexuality and victimhood. It examines the cultural conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instruments of modern power. As the first direct exploration of FSA victimhood, this book analyses: why victims of FSA remain so underexplored and invisible as objects of human science knowledge; the limited and overly rigid discourses in local and global psychological theory and practice that continues to treat particular subjects as ‘victim worthy’ through paradigms that construct victimhood as gendered; and the possibility of new discourses that could disrupt normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and power in sex abuse, and as constitutive to the beginnings of a counter-knowledge on transgressive sexualities. By tracing the historical and cultural conditions of the emergence of FSA broadly and FSA victimhood specifically, Kramer illustrates how deeply engrained constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and self-identifying victimhood. Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is essential reading for academics, researchers and students alike, in the areas of psychology, sociology, gender studies, criminology, counselling and social work.


Knowing Victims

Knowing Victims

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  • Author: Rebecca Stringer
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1134746083
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 231

Knowing Victims explores the theme of victimhood in contemporary feminism and politics. It focuses on popular and scholarly constructions of feminism as ‘victim feminism’ – an ideology of passive victimhood that denies women’s agency – and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the debate about this ideology which has unfolded among feminists since the 1980s. The book critically examines a movement away from the language of victimhood across a wide array of discourses, and the neoliberal replacement of the concept of structural oppression with the concept of personal responsibility. In derogating the notion of ‘victim,’ neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind, rather than a worldly situation. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Lyotard, rape crisis feminism and feminist philosophy, Stringer situates feminist politicizations of rape, interpersonal violence, economic inequality and welfare reform as key sites of resistance to the victim-blaming logic of neoliberalism. She suggests that although recent feminist critiques of ‘victim feminism’ have critically diagnosed the anti-victim movement, they have not positively defended victim politics. Stringer argues that a conception of the victim as an agentic bearer of knowledge, and an understanding of resentment as a generative force for social change, provides a potent counter to the negative construction of victimhood characteristic of the neoliberal era. This accessible and insightful analysis of feminism, neoliberalism and the social construction of victimhood will be of great interest to researchers and students in the disciplines of gender and women’s studies, psychology, sociology, politics and philosophy.


Aversion and Erasure

Aversion and Erasure

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  • Author: Carolyn J. Dean
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • ISBN: 1501707493
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 204

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of "Never Again": as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are.The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s.Dean argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis. Dean's latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of "deserving" and "undeserving" victims on those who have suffered.


Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2020)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2020)

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  • Author: Elizabeth Foxwell
  • Publisher: McFarland
  • ISBN: 1476641455
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 272

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.


Revisiting the 'Ideal Victim'

Revisiting the 'Ideal Victim'

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  • Author: Duggan, Marian
  • Publisher: Policy Press
  • ISBN: 1447339150
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 340

Nils Christie’s (1986) seminal work on the ‘Ideal Victim’ is reproduced in full in this edited collection of vibrant and provocative essays that respond to and update the concept from a range of thematic positions. Each chapter celebrates and commemorates his work by analysing, evaluating and critiquing the current nature and impact of victim identity, experience, policy and practice. The collection expands the focus and remit of ‘victim studies’, addressing key themes around race, gender, faith, ability and age while encompassing new and diverse issues. Examples include sex workers as victims of hate crimes, victims’ experiences of online fraud, and recognising historic child sexual abuse victims in Ireland. With contributions from an array of academics including Vicky Heap (Sheffield Hallam University), Hannah Mason-Bish (University of Sussex) and Pamela Davies (Northumbria University), as well as a Foreword by David Scott (The Open University), this book evaluates the contemporary relevance and applicability of Christie’s ‘Ideal Victim’ concept and creates an important platform for thinking differently about victimhood in the 21st century.