Anger, hatred, or just heartlessness? Defining gratuitous violence

Bruce, David

doi:10.17159/2413-3108/2010/v0i34a871

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This line of inquiry requires further investigation. See Bruce (2010) for a discussion of the definitional complexity of gratuitous violence in the context of South Africa.…”

Section: Conclusion: Social Death Futurity and Repairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

Luckett

2023

Environ Plan D

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Marapong, “place of bones”, is situated in the shadow of the coal-fired Matimba Power Station and Grootegeluk coal mine in Lephalale, northern South Africa. Marapong was named after the bones of a local woman, Salaminah Moloantoa, which were found during the development of Grootegeluk in 1973. That same year her bones were buried on Naawontkomen farm where she had lived. Thirty-four years later with the construction of coal-fired Medupi Power Station, Moloantoa’s bones became the site of industrial construction again in this current iteration of extractivism. Working from two provocations that emerged during fieldwork – we are dead here and the mines turn our lives upside down – I relocate social death and its relation to different kinds of violence that constitute racial capitalism in this city of coal. In so doing, I engage with literature on Afropessimism, the black radical tradition, and land and ancestral struggles and argue for reconceptualising social death as grounded in place and time rather than a totalising ontological condition. Such a rereading emphasises relationality and the processes of contestation over land, life, and death, that open up futures beyond that of bones becoming coal for fossil fuel development.

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“…This line of inquiry requires further investigation. See Bruce (2010) for a discussion of the definitional complexity of gratuitous violence in the context of South Africa.…”

Section: Conclusion: Social Death Futurity and Repairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

Luckett

2023

Environ Plan D

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“…Understanding these processes means that psychologists need to account for process factors and their important correlates to complement injury outcome data. One important correlate is the degree of violence exercised in incidents (Bruce, 2010), a seemingly measurable and obviously differentiable dimension of violence that at least chronologically is located between intention and injury in acts of violence. In public health terms, the degree of violence is associated with the nature and severity of the injury outcome measured, for example, by an injury severity score (Sleet et al, 2011).…”

Section: Rethinking Typologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging risk and enactment: the role of psychology in leading psychosocial research to augment the public health approach to violence in South Africa

Bowman

Stevens

Eagle

et al. 2014

South African Journal of Psychology

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In the wake of apartheid, many in the South African health and social sciences shifted their orientation to understanding violence. Rather than approaching violence as a criminal problem, post-apartheid scholarship surfaced violence as a threat to national health. This re-orientation was well aligned with a global groundswell that culminated in the World Health Assembly’s 1996 declaration of violence as a public health problem. In response, researchers and other stakeholders have committed to the public health approach to violence in South Africa. Despite some unquestionable successes in applying this approach, violence remains a critical social issue and its recalcitrantly high rates signal that there is still much work to be done. One avenue for more focussed research concerns understanding the mechanisms by which upstream risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments. We argue that South African psychology is well placed to provide greater resolution to this focus. We begin by providing a brief overview of the public health approach to violence. We then point to three specific areas in which the limits to our understanding of the way that downstream psychological and upstream social risk factors converge in situations of violence, compromise the theoretical and prevention traction promised by this approach and chart several basic psychosocial research coordinates for South African psychology. Steering future studies of violence by these coordinates would go some way to addressing these limits and, in so doing, extend on the substantial gains already yielded by the public health approach to violence in South Africa.

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Anger, hatred, or just heartlessness? Defining gratuitous violence

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

Bridging risk and enactment: the role of psychology in leading psychosocial research to augment the public health approach to violence in South Africa

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