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From Print To Pixel: Visual Media And The Fate Of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism
Abstract
In order to be heard or seen, nonviolent social movements (NVSMs) require an audience. News images of nonviolent protests become the means through which awareness of social movements is created. Comparative historical and semiotic analysis of journalistic images demonstrates that violence is a prominent theme within news coverage of nonviolent struggles. Four types of violence within nonviolence are identified: state violence, third-party violence, self-inflicted violence and symbolic violence. The examination of news images of these four types of violence showed the different ways in which challengers and the state contest power in the public domain through the media, in both text and images. Various actors (the state, social movements, journalists, the audience) use news images to historicize and construct their narratives of unfolding events, as well as make transhistorical claims. In this process, they deliberately employ news images to advocate for their causes, align themselves with previous heroes of civil disobedience and play on the popular understandings of good and evil. While this project focuses on different types of media, they have affected their audiences in similar ways, providing the space not only to the state within which they emerged, but also to those who seek to reform the state, like all of the movements in this study did. The media are the environment within which images circulate and as such they influence who images reach and, to a lesser extent, what effect they may have on the viewers. The power of images lies in both their universality that connects them with their genealogical predecessors and their singularity that underscores the specific conditions in which they emerge, making the ultimate outcome of the protests uncertain. The dissertation contributes to the research on social movements, mass communication, conflict and social change. It also raises the question of how images can be analyzed and incorporated into sociological research.
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Photojournalism" is a term and a concept that has been superimposed on the history of photography in hindsight. Coming into usage only after the rise of picture magazines in the 1920S and 1930S, the term has been applied freely in histories of photography to describe a wide range of photographic practice, often beginning with the first daguerreotype and calotype scenes of the 1830s.1 The presentist tendency to apply current concepts and paradigms to the past is not unusual, but in this case it seem s specifically linked to the belief that the stature of modern photojournalism will be enhanced by situating it in a time-honored tradition. Lacking the pedigree accorded to fine art, photojournalism seems always in search of a tradition. In any case, histories of photojournalism are often most telling not for what they reveal about the int entions and practices of photographers at the time pictures were made but for what they indicate about current views of history and the way people mark, condense, and symbolize the histori cal past in the present. War photography is of particular importance in thi s regard, epitomizing as it does an ideal of photojournalism practice, providing a proving ground for photojournalistic reputation, and ultimately supplying national symbols To ignore photojournalism is to Ignore history.-Howard Chapnick , president , Bl ack Star Photo Agency of patriotism, solida rity, death, and sacrifice. Combat photojournalism has come to repre sent the height of photographic realism. Photo correspondent s are described as wielding cameras like weapons, rushing with bravado into the midst of the action to "shoot" the valiant and grim events of human conflict. Yet the history of wartime pictures reveals a contradictory impulse; icons of warfare and national history prove less candid and realistic, less visually descriptive of specific events, than Chap nick's equation of photojour-nalism with history would suggest. The enduring images of war are not tho se that exhibit the mo st raw and genuine depictions of life and death on th e battlefield, nor those that illustra te historically specific information about peop le, places, and things, but rather those that mo st readily present themselves as symbols of cultural and national myth.
Organizational failure is an incomplete process because routines and norms persist through employee careers. Qualitative interviews with former employees from four newspapers and two investment banks, all of which are bankrupt or disbanded, demonstrate ongoing utilization of routines and ongoing compliance to norms despite severed connections to the failed firm. Routines are most likely to persist when they relate to low-volatility processes that do not require maintenance to ensure ongoing accessibility. Characteristics that make norms transferable are also identified. Adherence to aesthetic and pragmatic norms depends on how well they fit into new occupational contexts: uptake varies in proportion to the similarity between the failed firm and the new occupational setting of a failure survivor. Justice-oriented norms are not context-dependent; they persist regardless of post-failure employment outcomes. In fact, justice-oriented norms are found to drive the selection of new occupations as journalists seek normative consistency in their careers and some investment bankers change careers to reclaim a sense of purpose lost in banking. These observations hold whether survivors find employment in incumbent firms, entrepreneurial projects, or as freelancers. As survivors adapt work practices, their efforts constitute a form of inter-organizational innovation that generates organizational heterogeneity within unstable industries. Post-failure continuity provides an important and largely undocumented mechanism for the preservation of organizational attributes and the diversification of organizational form amidst crisis, an adaptive process that reconsiders the normative environment of a business and selectively discards assumptions about how firms ought to be. Survivors of failure often face a dilemma in deciding whether to attempt to re-create an occupational setting similar to the firm that failed or to go a different direction. This work takes up this dilemma, asking what insight business ethics research can provide for those who might wonder about the purpose of their firms. A theory of property is used to articulate a normative argument: firms should fail when they are unable to cover their debts and externalities, and firms should survive when they generate surplus value. The dissertation contributes to organizational theories of evolution, to the study of career trajectories, and to a life-cycle approach to business ethics.
PhotoTherapy Techniques use therapy clients' own personal snapshots and family photos (and the feelings, memories, thoughts and information these evoke) as catalysts for therapeutic communication and healing. This article discusses this flexible system of interactive techniques and demonstrates how they can be used by any kind of trained Therapist regardless of conceptual orientation, professional affiliation, preferred intervention model or approach (or degree of prior familiarity with photography itself), as well as how these techniques can be of particular benefit in Arts Therapies practices. After a brief review of theoretical underpinnings, comparisons of similarities and differences with Art Therapy (and Therapeutic Photography), and an introduction to the techniques in general, each of the five major PhotoTherapy techniques is presented and illustrated with anecdotal examples from the author's professional practice as an Art Therapist, Psychologist and Trainer of these techniques.
Los efectos de la violencia en la televisión han sido ampliamente estudiados desde una perspectiva experimental, que soslaya en cierto modo la interacción entre emisor y receptor. El presente trabajo plantea una perspectiva complementaria que tiene en cuenta la interpretación y la elaboración que los espectadores hacen de las emisiones. Se propone identificar y analizar las dimensiones sociales que mediatizan las experiencias emocionales ante la violencia vista en televisión y cómo esas dimensiones emocionales, que se construyen en el discurso, están ligadas a actitudes, dimensiones éticas y posiciones de acción. El discurso analizado procede de ocho grupos de discusión �compuestos diferencialmente respecto al género, la edad y el nivel educativo�, que se analizaron a partir de las emociones que experimentan ante la violencia en la televisión. El análisis del discurso muestra, en primer lugar, la importancia de una primera movilización emocional, con referencias a emociones complejas y, en segundo lugar, una articulación de la experiencia emocional respecto de la repetición de escenas (modalidad, clasificación y evaluación), los actos (legitimación o no) y los personajes (identificación o desidentificación). En conclusión, el doble impacto de las emociones (inmediato y diferido) genera narrativas complejas que abocan a un único curso de acción caracterizado por la responsabilidad y la culpa, que solo puede tenerse en cuenta asumiendo el papel activo del espectador.
Protest is now central to politics in Western democracies, but it is known to citizens mainly through portrayals in the media. Yet the media cover only a small fraction of public protests, raising the possibility of selection bias. We study this problem by comparing police records of demonstrations in Washington, D.C. in 1982 and 1991 with media coverage of the events in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on three national television networks. We model the consequences of demonstration form, context, and purpose on the likelihood of media coverage. The estimated size of a demonstration and its importance to the current media issue attention cycle are the strongest predictors of its coverage. Additional analyses support our claim that heightened media attention to an issue increases the likelihood that protests related to that issue will be covered. Comparing 1982 to 1991 suggests that television coverage of protests is increasingly subject to the impact of media issue attention cycles.
When the State Committee on the State of Emergency (henceforth the Emergency Committee) seized power in the early morning of 19 August 1991, it took steps immediately to assert control over Central Television, radio and the press. At one o'clock in the morning on 19 August, Gennadii Shishkin, first deputy director of TASS, was awakened by a phone call from Leonid Kravchenko, the conservative director of Gosteleradio (the State Committee on Television and Radio) and asked to come to Central Committee headquarters.2 By 2 a.m., the chief editor of the nightly news program "Vremia" had been awakened. Then, at dawn, military vehicles and paratroopers surrounded the Gosteleradio building at Ostankino.
Picturing China in the American Press juxtaposes what the ordinary American news reader was shown visually inTime Magazine between 1949 and 1973 with contemporary perspectives on the behind-the-scenes history of the period. Time Magazine is an especially fruitful source for such a visual-historical contrast and comparison because it was China-centric, founded and run by Henry Luce, a man who loved China and was commensurably obsessed with winning China to democracy and Western influence. Picturing China examines in detail major events (the Korean War and Nixon's trip to China), less considerable occurrences (shellings of Straits islands and diplomatic flaps), great personages (Chairman Mao and Henry Kissinger), and the common people and common life of China as seen through the lenses and described by the pens of American reporters, artists, photographers, and editors. Picturing China in the American Press is of great interest to both scholars of communications, Chinese history, China Studies, and journalists.
Growing evidence points to the pivotal role of framing processes in the mobilization of social movements. Our study contributes to framing theory by drawing on data from state-level woman suffrage movements in the U.S. to provide a systematic comparison of the mobilizing capacities of different collective action frames. Specifically, we examine the differential impact of the justice, societal reform, and home protection frames. Rather than assuming that all frames deployed by movements contribute equally to successful mobilization, we distinguish between effective and ineffective frames. Results of cross-sectional time series analyses suggest that the use of the reform frame positively influenced membership growth in state suffrage organizations, while the use of the justice and home protection frames had no effect. We conclude that there are three key determinants of a frame's mobilizing capacity: a balanced (i.e., culturally resonant and oppositional) message, the range of issues addressed, and the effective neutralization of counterframes
The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes. The seven spent three years involved in an ongoing project designed to take stock, and attempt a partial synthesis, of various literatures that have grown up around the study of non-routine or contentious politics. As such, it is likely to be viewed as a groundbreaking volume that not only undermines conventional disciplinary understanding of contentious politics, but also lays out a number of provocative new research agendas.
Distant Suffering, first published in 1999, examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith's moral theory, he examines three rhetorical 'topics' available for the expression of the spectator's response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.
Cambridge Core - Texts in Political Thought - Weber: Political Writings - edited by Peter Lassman
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Fifty years ago African Americans were severely oppressed. Not only were they unable to enjoy many of the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the US Constitution but also, under Jim Crow, blacks were denied the franchise, barred from interacting with whites in public spaces, and trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, where they were relegated to the poorest paying and least desirable jobs. The modern civil rights movement, a major social force in the mid-1950s, was the vehicle through which African Americans and their supporters overthrew Jim Crow. Partly as a response to this groundbreaking movement, scholars have constructed a new concept of social movements where organization, strategic thinking, cultural traditions, and political encounters figure largely as explanatory factors in analyses of social movements.
Women's responses in the context of focus groups to fashion photographs and clothing advertisements in Vogue magazine and to a brief questionnaire eliciting their attitudes toward clothing and fashion are used to examine the nature and extent of hegemonic influences in fashion. Participants' sources of information about fashion suggest that the authority of the fashion press is limited. The magazine's conceptions of women's roles as expressed in its fashion photography fit a model of "conflicted" hegemony characteristic of American media and popular culture in general. Empowered by the cultural context of conflicted hegemony, women were generally critical of fashion photographs. Their responses to photographs were influenced by their acceptance of traditional norms of feminine demeanor but varied by age and race. They rejected the magazine's orientation toward the use of fashionable clothing for postmodernist role-playing in favor of a modernist outlook.
Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the post-Soviet, ethnic, and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society, and international relations. This study surveys the modern history of the modern social movements in the West and their diffusion to the global South through war, colonialism, and diffusion, and it puts forward a theory to explain its cyclical surges and declines. It offers an interpretation of the power of movements that emphasizes effects on the lives of militants, policy reforms, political institutions, and cultural change. The book focuses on the rise and fall of social movements as part of contentious politics in general and as the outcome of changes in political opportunities and constraints, state strategy, the new media of communication, and transnational diffusion.
This paper examines empirical evidence pertaining to perception of pictures by human beings. It is particularly concerned with the evidence that within the species differences are found between culturally disparate groups; and within such groups between subgroups differing in age and between men and women. It is stressed that whether a stimulus can be regarded as a picture depends on both the nature of the stimulus and the nature of the observer; in addition the task which a subject is requested to perform is a crucial determinant in any assessment of pictorial perception. In consequence stimuli which are seen as pictures by some observers may appear to other observers as mere meaningless lines and blotches or may evoke responses which would be appropriate if the stimulus were the depicted object or scene but not a picture; an infinity of intermediate responses is also available. Two characteristics of pictures, their ability to evoke perception of depth where none is present (eidolicity) and their ability to represent objects (epitomy) are described and their relationship to the skill of pictorial perception is briefly discussed.
This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative speech acts, the demonstrative orientational specifications, and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations. The features of political semiosis structure the flow of historical events by managing the specific media and generic forms that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11 illuminates this approach's capabilities.
We propose morality shifting as a mechanism through which individuals can maintain a moral image of the ingroup. We argue that a shift from the moral principles of harm and fairness to those of loyalty and authority occurs when assessing a potentially threatening event, particularly among high ingroup glorifiers. Three studies confirmed this hypothesis using three different methodologies. Study 1 compared the use of language related to four moral foundations formulated in moral psychology in response to ingroup- and outgroup-committed wrongdoings. Results showed that loyalty- and authority-related words were used more, whereas harm- and fairness-related words were used less in response to ingroup- compared with outgroup-committed wrongdoings. Study 2 replicated this effect with regards to the cognitive accessibility of these moral principles. Study 3 confirmed that morality shifting is a motivated response to social identity threat, rather than a response to mere activation of social identity. Finally, as predicted, Study 3 demonstrated the effect of morality shifting to be moderated by ingroup glorification but not ingroup attachment. Implications and consequences for intergroup and individual wrongdoings, as well as for intergroup relations, are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.