Essays reflecting on our understanding and moral judgement of violence. The essays argue that even serious violence is not a simple fact, but a category of thought and practice rooted in history, culture and society.

Analyzes how the rhetoric of Yugoslav intellectuals and politicians and the U.S.-led Western media and political leadership framed the serbs as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Violence, Culture and Censure consists of a series of original and challenging essays reflecting upon the understanding and moral judgement of violence in the twentieth century. It shows that even serious violence is not a simple behavioural fact speaking for itself but a category of thought and practice deeply rooted in history, culture and society. Representing contemporary theoretical developments within sociological criminology, this book suggests that the twentieth century has thrown so much philosophical doubt over the idea that violence is unequivocally and always bad behaviour that the issue for many now concerns what violence means. The book is thus at the interface between sociology and cultural studies. Taking a range of examples, the authors illustrate the difficulties in defining and explaining violence outside of a theory of the censures which either inspire it or describe it, and thus the value of understanding its relation to cultural and historical context. They illustrate the uncomfortable proximity between practices of censured violence and the censorious violence of law and order. This dialectical theme is evidenced by studies of violence in areas of much contemporary interest including: sadomasochism, the Holocaust, Latin American dictatorships, the punishment of blacks in the USA, the content of Tarantino films, and the philosophy of violence.

The volume configures a multidisciplinary perspective on the concept of intellectual elites and describes their action in Eastern European cultures, bringing together studies signed by a number of eminent Romanian scholars from various fields of the Humanities.

American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Edward Omeni draws on concepts from sociology, psychology, and social pedagogical research to examine experiences of violence among international students in Poland. His research study places particular focus on the range of strategies adopted by the students in response to forms of personal and social violence as well as the resulting forms of social exclusion and precariousness. By means of a detailed analysis of narrative accounts, the dynamics of coping with violence are theorized in the situational/social-cultural context of higher education in Poland, where aspects of intercultural relations and identity struggles of ethnic and cultural minorities remain relatively understudied.

This book explores the work of criminologist Colin Sumner. It re-presents his arguments and ideas on Marxism, ideology, censure, deviance, crime, underdevelopment, social control and the media; situating them in their wider social context. Moxon argues that Sumner should be restored within the criminology discipline as a pioneer who has produced works of great theoretical sophistication and insight. By systematically considering Sumner’s entire output, the book shows how his thought involved a gradually deepening understanding of his core notion of ideological censure. His writing is also marked by a growing unease with the effects of late modern capitalism and the quagmire of censoriousness rife in the 21st century. This book makes clear that Sumner’s work was remarkably prescient, and his ideas may help up to make sense of complicated times.

A broad survey on how audiences make meaning out of mass media Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

Qualifying post-Westphalian sovereign statehood as a ‘power’ as argued for in Hendrik Berkhoff’s political theology, this book addresses the decades-long theological-spiritual debate between Christian realism and Christian pacifism in U.S. foreign policy and global Christian circles. It approaches the debate by delving into the pacifist Anabaptist political theology and delineates empirically how sovereign statehood in post-colonial Africa and Asia has fallen into the hands of the devil Satan, as a ‘fallen power’ in the Foucaultian terms of power structures, techniques and episteme. While the book offers intervention schemes and options, it holds that Christian statecraft remains the source of hope to effectively address a number of serious global issues. By extension, the book is thus an invitation to ignite debates on the suitability of Christian statecraft and the nexus between spirituality and world politics, making it especially interesting for scholars and students in the fields of International Politics, Politics of Asian and African States, Post-colonial Studies and Political Theology.