Design as Symbolic Violence. Design for Social Justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life. The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design can function to naturalise oppressions and then obfuscate power relations around this process. Through symbolic violence, design can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they (and ultimately ‘we’) depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Champs de bataille: experiences et imaginaires

This contribution takes as its starting point the original conception of the overall research project which sought to examine the ‘battle’ as an event and a cultural act. It examines the representation of violence by non-combatants – who are in any case implicated in the act of war – as well as by combatants themselves. It does, however, also slightly subvert the original proposition of the war narrative as a historical source, towards the idea of the war narrative as a source of artistic representation, as well as towards the notion of ‘narrative’ understood in its broadest sense, towards visual as well as written narratives. The primary focus is however, a specific site of the violence perpetrated and endured by soldiers, the battlefield. One of the fundamental questions posed by the analysis here concerns the issue of the representation and of the reality of the battlefield, and of the reception of the expression of violence. Is representation in fact the only authentic way to seize and to try to understand violence? These questions, and some of the examples used in the first section dealing with the ‘experience’ of the battlefield, have their origins in work conducted for two decades within the international and interdisciplinary research group, the ‘Group for War and Culture Studies’, and therefore concern the bases of a cultural approach to the study of war. In the second section, the analysis moves from the notion of experience to the work of the imagination with a reading of various battlefields created by the contemporary artist Cozette de Charmoy; these are imaginary battlefields certainly, but ones which viscerally engage the body of the soldier and which seem to enable the reader/spectator to access a collective experience. Finally, the question is raised of whether representation actually becomes performative, if it becomes the experience itself, and a way not to ‘see’ that experience, but to ‘know’ it.

Armed violence and the politics of gun control in Brazil: an analysis of the 2005 referendum

This article analyses the factors behind the paradoxical result of the Brazilian gun-control referendum. It adopts a qualitative approach to explore the dissemination of ideologies surrounding crime, gun control and security. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with activists involved in the referendum's campaign. The results reveal that ideologically driven campaigns in a context of corruption scandals, high levels of violence and fear influenced the result. The neoliberal discourse of individual freedoms played a role, as did the phrasing of the referendum's question, fragile confidence in public institutions and unequal campaign funding and regulation.