scholarly journals On Witnessing a Riot

Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Brooks ◽  
Michael Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Public Health Systems ◽  
Racial Biases

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.

scholarly journals The Case of Ahmad Shamieh’s Campaign against Dublin Deportation: Embodiment of Political Violence and Community Care

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 154
Author(s):  
Jelka Zorn
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Community Care ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The World ◽  
Dublin Regulation

Differently from studies that analyze antideportation struggles in relation to concepts of state sovereignty and (un)making of citizenship, this paper focuses more on intersection of politics and body. It discusses struggle for the “place in the world” as an embodied experience. Ahmad Shamieh came to Slovenia in 2016 through the humanitarian corridor on the Balkan route. The Slovene Ministry of the Interior refused to examine his asylum claim and instead issued him a Dublin Regulation decision, stating that he was to be deported to Croatia. Ahmad’s and his supporters’ legal and political struggle, which lasted several years, prevented his deportation. In contrast to state’s politics of exclusion, causing dehumanization and traumatization the grassroots community struggle developed the politics of inclusion, solidarity and care from below, in practice transforming the conditions of belonging.

Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-174
Author(s):  
Eric Chalfant
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
White Noise ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spiritual Meaning ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Warren Weaver

This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studies by Mark Taylor. Then, a close reading of Don Delillo’s White Noise draws out the potential of noise to highlight media’s ability to provide spiritual meaning and truth through an affect of divination. Finally, I connect these themes to current conceptions of media’s relationship to truth as well as recent anthropology on religious divination, suggesting the utility of noise to aid in scholarly efforts to materialize both media studies and religious studies as they engage with affect theory.

Cinema’s Municipalities

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-82
Author(s):  
Noah Tsika
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
National Model ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the growing sophistication of collaborations between Hollywood and particular police forces during cinema’s first decades, showing how the locations of the emerging film industry—municipalities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—decisively shaped that industry’s relationship to law enforcement. Representing a deliberate departure from the one- and two-reel films that had lampooned the police through slapstick and other farcical gestures, certain feature films also augured industrial trends that would run far deeper than onscreen depictions, involving law enforcement officials as more than just objects of narrative fascination. The national promotion of such films illustrates more than just the emergence of standardized, studio-dictated distribution and exhibition policies. It also indicates the coalescence of a national model of law enforcement that, like the strategies of circulation and ballyhoo determined at a studio’s corporate headquarters, experienced at least some degree of alteration at the local level, where municipal police departments, neighborhood cinemas, and other small businesses shaped, in idiosyncratic and often unpredictable ways, both professional methods and popular reception practices.

Transmediality and the End of Disembodied Semiotics

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A Bateman
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Major Topic ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Contemporary Media

The phenomena of mixing, blending, and referencing media is a major topic in contemporary media studies. Finding a sufficient semiotic foundation to characterize such phenomena remains challenging. The current article argues that combining a notion of ‘semiotic mode' developed within the field of multimodality with a Peircean foundation contributes to a solution in which communicative practices always receive both an abstract ‘discourse'-oriented level of description and, at the same time, a biophysically embodied level of description as well. The former level supports complex communication, the latter anchors communication into the embodied experience. More broadly, it is suggested that no semiotic system relevant for human activities can be adequately characterized without paying equal attention to these dual facets of semiosis.

Metropolitan Los Angeles: A Study in Integration; IV. Law Enforcement

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
George Andrew Hopper ◽  
Robert F. Wilcox ◽  
James Trump ◽  
James R. Donoghue ◽  
Morton Kroll
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles

Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Hate Crime Victimization: Identity Politics or Identity Risk?

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Hate Crime ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Gay And Lesbian ◽  
Crime Victimization ◽  
The Impact

This study examined the impact of hate crimes upon gay and lesbian victims, reviewing 1,538 hate crimes committed in Los Angeles County. Differences between sexual orientation and other hate crime categories were considered for offense severity, reportage to law enforcement, and victim impact. The type of offense varied between crimes classified for sexual orientation (n = 551) and other bias-motivated crimes (n = 987). Assault, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking were predictive of sexual orientation hate crimes. Sexual orientation bias crimes evidenced greater severity of violence to the person and impact upon victim level of functioning. More violent forms of aggression were predictive of gay and lesbian victim’s underreportage to law enforcement. For sexual orientation offenses, victim gender and race/ethnicity differences were predictive of the base rates of crime reportage as well. These findings are considered in terms of a group-risk hypothesis, encountered by multiple outgroup persons, that influences help-seeking behavior and ingroup identity.

scholarly journals The Turn to Affect and Emotion in Media Studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margreth Lünenborg ◽  
Tanja Maier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Affect Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Central Interest ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Media And Communication

This editorial delivers an introduction to the thematic <em>Media and Communication </em>issue on “The Turn to Affect and Emotion in Media Studies”. The social and cultural formation of affect and emotion has been of central interest to social science-based emotion research as well as to affect studies, which are mainly grounded in cultural studies. Media and communication scholars, in turn, have especially focused on how emotion and affect are produced by media, the way they are communicated through media, and the forms of emotion audiences develop during the use of media. Distinguishing theoretical lines of emotion theory in social sciences and diverse traditions of affect theory, we reflect on the need to engage more deeply with affect and emotion as driving forces in contemporary media and society. This thematic issue aims to add to ongoing affect studies research and to existing emotion research within media studies. A special emphasis will be placed on exploring structures of difference and power produced in and by media in relation to affect and emotion.

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