Violence and emotions

Violence: An international journal is launching a call for papers on the theme “Violence and emotions. Towards a description of everyday violence”. This special issue will be coordinated by guest editor Adrian Scribano, University of Buenos Aires, CONICET, Gino Germani Research Institute.

For its general articles’ section, Violence: An international journal is also welcoming papers that deal with issues of violence and exiting violence.

Dossier: Violence and emotions. Towards a description of everyday violence

Adrian Scribano, University of Buenos Aires, CONICET, Gino Germani Research Institute

In the Social Sciences there is a long history that connects violence and emotions. Even though across controversial and then outdated approaches, this is present since the first reflections around individual and collective behavior, such as those of Le Bon, Tarde and Canetti. Often, proximity with disciplines such as psychology and social psychology have characterized the discussion of the connections between violence and emotions. Yet, a focus on the historical, social and structural premises of violent behavior has often characterized more recent discussions. For example, the feminist scholar Sara Hamed (2001) has shown how it is inappropriate to understand hate as a psychological disposition and suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments and therefore that hate does not reside in a subject, object or body individually.

This special issue would like to situate such important and complex traditions of studies in the current contexts of our societies, in different areas of the world and in different cultural environments. It is intended to open a space for discussion that reflects, once again, on what kind of connections exist between violence and emotions, with the aim of advancing on the belief that emotions “generate” violence or vice versa in a simplistic and linear way.

The aim is to highlight how violent behavior – particularly in the form of interpersonal violence – is related to emotional states of fear, rage, resignation, frustration of self-focused practices in different situations of everyday life. However, the special issue is interested in highlighting as well the way in which past forms of interpersonal violence and emotions are re-interpreted today. We are interested in focalizing on phenomena as varied as the escalation of femicidal violence, the violence of local organized crime, violence among very young people at school or in playground areas, the forms of political violence in democratic contexts and so on. We are as well interested in the forms of intensified violence of social interaction, where fury, revenge, and brutality emerge from new forms of legitimization, and the loss of proportionality of the act that involves an ‘emotional ecology’ such as the interruption of enjoyment, and the disconnection with the other as triggers and accelerators of the spiral of interpersonal violence.

In this framework, we invite to send a proposal included in this broad framework of investigation, especially but not only referred to:

• Violence and Emotions: theoretical approaches
• Violence against women, masculinity and emotions
• Collective action and various forms of violence
• Political violence
• Violence, media and emotions
• Violence and youth: school, leisure time, youth cultures
• Public policies and institutional forms of violence
• Historical examples of emotions and violence relation

About Violence: An international journal

Today, violence, in all its forms, constitutes a vast field of research in the social sciences.

The same is not true of preventing and exiting violence, which do not have their own well-structured space within the humanities. Much more empirical than theoretical, understanding of these issues is produced more by actors (NGOs, associations), experts, and practitioners than by social science scholars.

Violence: An international journal endeavors to gather together and support a large community of scholars and practitioners, focusing on two complementary yet distinct scientific and intellectual issues: the analysis of violence, in its diverse manifestations, and preventing and exiting violence.

In doing so, Violence: An international journal aims to develop understanding about violence, but also to build up a delineated field of research for preventing and exiting violence, with its contributions and debates.

Each issue opens with a series of general articles, which are be followed by a theme section, composed by articles, debates and interviews. Violence: An international journal also makes a special effort to link together research in the social sciences and other fields of knowledge, forging bonds with literary and artistic circles in particular, with contributions dealing with exiting violence through the lens of art.

Violence: An international journal has the ambition to reach a readership composed of academics, but also a larger audience, including the actors involved in preventing and exiting violence: NGOs, associations, politics, legal experts, and civil society. Articles for Violence: An international journal will nonetheless go through the usual process of academic journals. Once accepted by the editorial board, each article will be sent for peer-review. Changes may then be asked to the author.

The journal is published twice a year in English by Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme and SAGE Publications.

Guidelines

Articles should include a summary, a detailed bibliography and a short biography. Each article should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words in length (including footnotes, bibliography, biography). It should be sent, preferably, in Word format and use, systematically, Harvard Reference Style, as follows:

Book

Clark JM and Hockey L (1979) Research for Nursing. Leeds: Dobson Publishers.

Book chapter

Gumley V (1988) Skin cancers. In: Tschudin V and Brown EB (eds) Nursing the Patient with Cancer. London: Hall House, pp.26–52.

Journal article

Huth EJ, King K and Lock S (1988) Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. British Medical Journal 296(4): 401–405.

Website

Website National Center for Professional Certification (2002) Factors affecting organizational climate and retention. Available at: www.cwla.org./programmes/triechmann/2002fbwfiles (accessed 10 July 2010).

Newspaper / Magazine

Clark JM (2006) Referencing style for journals. The Independent, 21 May, 10.

We ask you to pay particular attention to the quality of your writing style.

To contribute to Violence: An international journal, please send an article, fully written, either for the general articles’ section or for a theme section.