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Publications (60)
This chapter expands on important findings from the exploratory study of reclassified U.S. deaths, including: (1) that the perpetrators and victims in cases of covertly committed murder are disproportionately more likely to have shared a familial or other close relationship, compared to those involved in overtly committed incidents; and (2) that wo...
Covert violence is a type of everyday violence that exists deep in the shadows of society. Until now, it has eluded not only the attention of victims but also largely that of academics, journalists, members of law enforcement, and others with an interest in understanding crime and violent behavior. This book introduces the novel concept of covert v...
This chapter suggests that hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities are potential hotbeds for covert violence, if for no other reason than the fact that many people die there every year. After all, patients typically check into a hospital because of serious illness or injury, and nursing homes are intended for those in need of round-t...
This chapter includes several cases of secretive celebrity stalkers but otherwise mostly takes an unconventional approach to the idea of violence via media. In particular, the rise of digital technologies has allowed for new methods of covert attack—including doxxing, deepfakes, and other forms of terrifying harassment—as the so-called “dark web” p...
This chapter establishes the concept of covert violence and presents a variety of data that collectively suggest a much greater prevalence of this type of violence than has ever been formally recognized by law enforcement agencies, government entities, or crime scholars. It first reviews data on U.S. deaths classified by manner—accident, natural ca...
This chapter focuses on strategies for preventing covert violence, something that is perhaps even more difficult than preventing overt forms of criminal behavior. To a large degree, this is because the covert version is often harder to detect and/or is easily misunderstood as something else. Compared to maliciously inflicted injuries and deaths, th...
This chapter examines a wide range of violent acts that have been surreptitiously perpetrated throughout history and around the world. Covert violence has always played an important role in supplementing conventional warfare, and clandestine attacks by weaker operatives have had devastating consequences—even in a country like the United States that...
This chapter takes a close look at patterns of covert violence within U.S. schools. There is an unusually large number of middle-aged U.S. teachers (with no previously known serious medical problems) who have suffered sudden health emergencies—including death—in their classrooms, as well as numerous cases of students who have inserted a harmful sub...
This chapter examines the many layers, motivations, and outcomes that represent covert violence in the U.S. workplace. Although these acts seem to occur less frequently in this social institution compared to others, the connections to powerlessness are even clearer. This is largely because power itself tends to be distributed more explicitly in the...
On a beautiful Monday afternoon in the late fall of 2008, two men arrived at the Houston, Texas, home of their friend, a philosophy professor at the nearby university. They looked forward to the weekly discussions that focused on the theoretical traditions known as “Continental philosophy” and planned to continue their engaging dialog on Martin Hei...
Preventing covert violence is perhaps even more difficult than preventing overt forms of criminal behavior. To a large degree, this is because the covert version is often harder to detect and/or is easily misunderstood as something else. Enough cases of presumed accidental deaths subsequently turn out to be murders that we can reasonably assume tha...
On July 20, 2006, Adrienne Miranda, of Lutherville, Maryland, received the call that every parent dreads. On the line was her ex-husband, with whom she shared two sons, informing her that their 19-year-old son Joseph was dead. The only information known at that time was that the teenager had been found face down in the dirt after somehow being crus...
This book makes an unprecedented contribution to the field by explaining the interpretive processes through which subcultural phenomena are studied. Examining dimensions of interpretivism, it reveals how and why people decide to use specific conceptual frames or methodologies and how they shape their interpretations of everyday realities.
This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study profound conflicts rooted in the past. Addressing issues of racism, genocide, war, nationalism, colonialism and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.
Written by experts in interpretive sociology, this volume examines semiotic models in a sociological context. Contributors offer case studies to demonstrate 'how to do things' with semiotics. Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for understanding the connection between semiotics and sociology.
Using a social diagnosis approach to COVID-19-related trauma, this research bridges the fields of sociology of medicine, disaster response, digital sociology, and digital divides. Bringing these literatures into dialogue, we problematize the digitally mediated trauma ensuing from COVID-19. We unpack two emergent media pathways or channels to a soci...
This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms and traditions, experts from the UK, US, and India apply different approaches to engagement with beliefs and themes, including identity, ritual, and emotion.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Marking the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide,” we continue our metaphor of the digital inequality stack by mapping out the rapidly evolving nature of digital inequality using a broad lens. We tackle complex, and often unseen, inequalities spawned by the platform economy, automation, big data, algorithms, cybercrime, cybersafety, gaming, emot...
2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital...
We are all storytellers. We tell stories in a variety of settings, to a variety of audiences, and for a variety of reasons. We tell structured stories about personal experiences—narratives—as a means of understanding the past, constructing identities, and communicating ourselves to others. Drawing on social psychological literature on narratives, i...
Journalists often assume that consumers are drawn to stories of mass murder because of their morbid curiosity. As a result, cable television reports and news stories tend to focus on details of the killer’s biography and modus operandi, possibly neglecting aspects of an incident that could provide consumers with practical knowledge for preventing a...
Serial murder is deeply embedded in Western cultures, and serial killers are the subject of widespread coverage in news and entertainment media. Scholars suggest that mass media portrayals of these cases tend to present two images: the serial killer as monster and the serial killer as celebrity. Media representations reveal much about a culture, an...
Although mothers and fathers are equally likely to kill their children, maternal filicide cases tend to draw more media coverage and community outrage. While traditional gender role expectations appear to contribute to the community response that follows a report of filicide – and influence media representations – little is known about the offender...
In this study, we explore the ways in which young adults in the United Arab Emirates use communication technologies – especially social media – at a time of rapid change in the Arab world. Because young adults represent a large segment of the population within the Middle
East and also lead in technology adoption in this region, this group plays an...
This article seeks to open dialogue about the utility of resource mobilization theory in explaining social movements and their impact by exploring the use of social media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution through a limited case study analysis. It argues that social media played an instrumental role in the success of the anti-government protests that...
Although it is illegal to download copyrighted music off the Internet without paying for it, the majority of Americans – whether they download music or not – either don't see it as wrong or don't care. This paper utilizes social constructivist and symbolic interactionist theories in an analysis of news coverage to uncover the challenges computer an...
