‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field

Moghnieh, Lamia

doi:10.1080/20581831.2017.1318804

Cited by 20 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…These experiences that Syrians have gone through are often unrecognised as part of their journalistic labour, especially since Africa and the Middle East are historically portrayed as always already steeped in, or on the verge of, violence. As Moghnieh (2017) points out, anthropological literature on violence is dominated by notions of encounters with violence and exposures to trauma, while the experience of locals in a context of prolonged conflict has more to do with ‘living-in-violence’ and feeling forced to cope with it. This distinction is also helpful for journalism studies in order to move beyond the experiences of foreign correspondents, or the context of one-off acts of violence, as benchmarks for theorising the perils of reporting, and to turn instead to the experiences of communities that find themselves forced to live through violence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria

Al-Ghazzi

2021

Journalism

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Based on interviews with Syrian media practitioners, this article uses the notion of affective proximity to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country and community. I argue that the life-risking, and sometimes deadly, media practices of local reporters and witnesses, as well as their emotional labour, often do not feature in understandings of journalism when it is conceived as a purely professional discursive pursuit. I explain affective proximity in terms of an imagined space (or the lack thereof) between a media practitioner, on the one hand, and the event they are representing and participating in, on the other. In relation to Syria, I use it to analyse the word ‘revolution’ and what it mediates, the shifting boundaries between activism and journalism, and experiences of, and in, violence. I make the case that the study of affect and emotion in global news should be contextualized within the unequal power relations that give shape to journalistic roles and modes of representaiton.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria

Al-Ghazzi

2021

Journalism

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“…This relational understanding of life is reflected in social science and humanities researchers’ efforts to understand and document the effects of conditions ranging from conflict or post‐conflict environments to natural or human instigated disasters to abusive family environments (Lamoreaux 2020; Lester 2013; Moghnieh 2017; Yamaguchi 2018). Yet post‐genomic concerns about the potentially pathogenic outcomes and effects of overwhelming social forces and events have further served to amplify attention to the burden of “bad” environments in ways that depict and bind the potentials and futures of vulnerable, stigmatized lives, and communities to disabling views of hopelessness, struggle, and grief (Pentecost and Meloni 2020).…”

Section: Life As Postmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared Relations: Trauma and Kinship in the Afterlife of Death

Lloyd¹,

Larivée

2021

Med Anthropol Q

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Since 2013, we have studied the logic and narratives of an environmental epigenetics research team that studies the correlations between early childhood adversity (ECA), specific biomarkers, and suicide risk. Within this research program, kin of the deceased participate in psychological autopsies, which researchers use to establish to classify the deceased within a typology of suicide with or without abuse. We focus on the words of these family respondents and their reflections on the life and death of their loved ones, and life after that death, to consider the slippery, transgressive, and relational character of trauma and its effects. Studies of the residues of past experiences provide crucial insights into the complex, unpredictable, and unsettled nature of kin relations. These relations are based in entwined biographies of the living and the dead and illustrate the holds that people have on each other and destabilize biomedical models of individualized trajectories of suicide risk. [suicide, psychological autopsies, trauma, care, kinship]

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“…It was experienced as a form of slow violence that injured and contaminated bodies, livelihoods, and lands (Touhouliotis 2018). The experience of living in violence, rather than encountering it, predicated forms of suffering that were not necessarily psychological or traumatic (Moghnieh 2017). Nevertheless, humanitarian institutions and agencies working in Lebanon continue to advance trauma and PTSD as the only legitimate forms of war-related suffering.…”

Section: Al-mou'ash: Expert Assemblages Of Trauma and The Experience Of Living In Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

Moghnieh

2021

MAT

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This article traces the infrastructures of suffering under the governance of humanitarian psychiatry to explore how material conditions of war and aid have shaped the politics of trauma and sumud[steadfastness] in Lebanon. Based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2011 to 2013, I look at the expert, economic, and techno-political assemblages of trauma and sumudduring the July War in 2006 and the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. Mental health experts faced unexpected difficulties in diagnosing war trauma during the July War. This led political actors to claim that these difficulties reflected a general absence of suffering from war and a sign of Lebanese resilience, drawing on economies of sumudin postwar reconstruction. The Syrian refugee crisis however radically transformed the politics of suffering in Lebanon. A new political economy of trauma emerged where the Lebanese now competed with other aid communities to have their past suffering recognised as traumatic. Comparing the relations between violence, aid, and suffering in both instances serves to contextualise and historicise suffering beyond a particular discourse or event. It also serves to highlight the contingencies of suffering rather than its internal and psychic elements.

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‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field

Cited by 20 publications

References 14 publications

‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria

‘Forced to report’: Affective proximity and the perils of local reporting on Syria

Shared Relations: Trauma and Kinship in the Afterlife of Death

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

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