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Working Group: Violence

The working group investigates practices of violence. It employs a variety of methods and approaches to understand various forms of violence. The group is interested less in the potential causes of violence than in its manifestations and social contexts.

The researchers see violence as a power-based action constituting a deliberate violation of the physical or psychological integrity of a person. While the literature refers to physical, psychological, structural and cultural violence, the working group distances itself from concepts of cultural and structural violence to avoid slipping into the realm of the arbitrary.

The group assumes that violence is inherent to all social orders as a constitutive element. It examines violence in times of crisis. It is thus interested in the following questions:

1. What are the manifestations of violence that can be identified in different social contexts?
2. What are the logics behind processes of violence that can be decoded at the micro level using the method of thick description?
3. How does violence affect people's concepts of order?
4. To what extent do visualisations of violence have a stabilising or destabilising effect on authority?