(OMN1c) Omnibus III: Stigma, Terror, and Reparations

This panel devotes considered attention to how social trauma – collective experiences of suffering and adversity – is experienced, negotiated and resolved. Drawing on the diverse cases of racial reparations, territorial stigmatization and political violence, it engages with the interplay of social exclusion, symbolic boundaries and existential anxiety within modern societies. Tags: Race and Ethnicity, Social Movements

Organizers: James Walsh, Ontario Tech University, Sherry Fox, CSA; Chair: James Walsh, Ontario Tech University

Presentations

Jenny Nilsson, York University

Initiated "Reparations" Programs in the U.S. 2020-2022: An Analysis of the Twitter Discourse

The redress of historical racism has since the 1800s concerned a debate about reparations. While there is currently a vivid discussion both in activist, media, and academic spheres about attitudes toward potential reparations, few studies have looked at the discourse on the “reparative” programs that have already been initiated. In this study, I am analyzing the discourse surrounding self-declared reparative programs executed by six local governments in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022. These programs are mainly implementing monetary compensation and financial investments toward Black communities. Most initiatives claim to concern slavery reparations, and one initiative claims to address the demolishment of a Black neighborhood. I am utilizing data from approximately 1,000 tweets on Twitter, which I gather manually and analyze in NVivo. Employing a grounded theory approach, I am in the process of exploring the themes of the data from two theoretical lenses. First, utilizing the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory (Stern et al., 1999), I am exploring how attitudes towards these initiatives may vary. VBN is a useful theory for exploring support of social movements and has mainly been used to study support of the environmental movement. The theory rests on three pillars, namely (1) acceptance of the movement’s basic values, (2) recognition of threat or oppression of the movement’s subject, and (3) the belief that one’s action can make a difference which they feel obliged to contribute with. Using this framework, I am affirming that these reparative programs are a question of the reparations movement, as they are highly debated within the movement. They are endorsed by some and critiqued by others. Second, drawing from collective memory theory (Halbwachs, [1941] 2008), I am exploring how the atrocities to be redressed are described by users. Through this framework, I can investigate how different groups’ collective memories of slavery and other historical atrocities addressed in the programs may take the form of rites to uphold specific narratives (ibid.). Through connecting these two theories, I am able to study attitudes and (non-)support towards the initiated reparation programs, with particular emphasis on how collective memory may inform recognition of past atrocities. Initial findings in the early stages of my thematic analysis suggest that while the discourse on these initiatives concerns critique by both Black-presenting and White-presenting users, there are differences. Black users express concerns about the robustness of the programs, while White users tend to echo their general views of reparations. Implications for how these attitudes relate to collective memory will be further explored. This study highlights an understudied dimension of Americans’ attitudes towards specific reparative initiatives by exploring their views on already initiated government-level projects rather than their broader attitude towards future federal-level reparations. Moreover, the programs analyzed also bring attention to specific, local cases of atrocity, in contrast to the mainstream debate on reparations in media, where a more general language about atrocities tends to be used. In turn, this enables an analysis of the public’s attitudes toward very specific concerns addressed in these programs. Specifically, it enables an analysis of what can be understood as several layered aspects of the legacy of slavery and anti-Black segregation in the U.S. I hope that this presentation can contribute to fruitful discussions in the “Remember the Bad Times: Collective Memory and Crisis” session at the CSA. My study is particularly relevant for the second inquiry of the session as it directly explores how collective memories of oppression facing Black communities in the U.S. may inform attitudes toward reparations.

Rex Wang, York University

Who do you trust? A study of Canadian trust radius

This paper aims to establish a preliminary basis for the study of trust radius within Canadian society. The question “Generally speaking, do you think most people can be trusted?” has been the standard used to measure variation in social trust within and across populations, and a large body of research has used this measure to study origins of trust and how trust matters. However, scholars have suggested analysis via this measure can be problematic as interpretation of “most people '' can be ambiguous as some interpret it as in-group friends, relatives, and people they have contact with, while others interpret it as out-group strangers. Trust radius thus accounts for this by measuring the width of the social circle that trust is extended to; specifically, the measure focuses on trust for outgroup members and strangers relative to ingroup members such as family and friends, though it differs from outgroup trust alone. This distinction bears a critical implication, and has been used to explain the puzzling pattern in which cultures that are wary of outsiders, such as many Confucian societies, exhibit high trust levels. I aim to expand this research to Canadian society, starting with this preliminary analysis.

In Canada, social trust levels have been studied for both the broader population and the diverse social groups within , but trust radius remains unexplored. The diverse nature of Canadian society has unique trends absent in other western nations. Canadian immigrants tend to be more trusting than the native populations, and this general trust level tends to stay consistent overtime; however, their trust for other Canadians disproportionately declines as their stay extends. Trust radius may be key to understanding this relation as Canadian general trust levels rank relatively high compared to global levels, while their trust radius does not rank quite as high. Adopting the theory that social trust is established early in life and remains “sticky” throughout except in the case of critical life events such as unemployment, a goal of this paper will be to test whether or not similar trajectories can be found in trust radius on top of providing a broader statistical overview.

This paper will thus conduct a statistical analysis of trust radius in Canada utilizing the Canadian General Social Survey on social dimension, which included four waves of data on trust levels both broadly and in reference to specific groups. I will derive values for trust radius both broadly across Canada, but also across demographic groups designated by age, race and ethnicity, immigration status, gender, and more. This will give us a broad view of trust radius within Canadian society.  Furthermore, I will analyze trust radius in relation to major life events to test the hypothesis of “sticky” trust. Lastly, I will use trust radius as the independent and a collection of markers for health and social development as dependent in order to analyze social outcomes of trust radius levels. Through this analysis, I aim to provide a preliminary exploration into the discourse of Canadian trust radius, its causes and formation, as well as potential implications of differing levels within Canadian society.

James Walsh, Ontario Tech University

The Exceptional Everyday: Terrorism and the Weaponization of Daily Life

There was a bright light , A shattering of shop windows , The bomb in the baby carriage, Was wired to the radio - Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble Despite being overshadowed by several less spectacular, but considerably more lethal, risks (e.g. dog attacks, bee stings, traffic accidents, medical malpractice), terrorism remains a leading source of anxiety within Western societies. It, therefore, constitutes an imagined or phantom menace with perceptions of existential danger stemming more from hot cognitions and apocalyptic assessments than the objective extent of harm. While scholars have meticulously detailed how powerful actors and institutions (e.g. media outlets, security experts, elected officials) feed and profit from overblown reactions and moral panic, terrorists’ role in this process has received less attention. This neglect is unfortunate because, by allowing insurgents to punch above their weight and haunt citizens’ private thoughts and public lives, hyperbolic, if not entirely hallucinatory, fear represents terrorism’s primary engine and facilitator. This paper offers new insight into the stark disjuncture between terrorism’s material reality and subjective experience, and presents a conceptual framework that helps account for how otherwise diminutive actors are capable of generating seismic shifts in national and global politics. In building this understanding, the assembly and deployment of explosive devices – the leading method of insurgent violence – are assessed to underscore terrorism’s status as a form of quotidian violence. Drawing on exemplary actors, events and campaigns from throughout the modern era, it is argued that terrorists’ ability to roil societies and evoke overwhelming awareness of precarity stems from techniques of masking and improvisation grounded in the weaponization of the familiar and everyday. Specifically, by repurposing ubiquitous, banal artifacts to mask or manufacture lethal force – when, for instance, a bomb is ensconced within seemingly unremarkable things (e.g. cars, backpacks, parcels, rubbish bins, perambulators), cobbled together from domestic products or triggered by electrical appliances like radios and cell phones - terrorists succeed in orchestrating attacks that are disorienting, unpredictable andthwart effective countermeasures. Beyond being merely an instrumental effort to evade detection and fly under the proverbial radar, the fashioning of explosives from ordinary items and materials is interpreted as a symbolic onslaught and important means by which terrorists foster dark insecurity and amplify their crepuscular, anxiety-inducing character. In infiltrating the minutia of daily life and injecting the monstrous into the mundane, insurgents nurture vulnerability and produce confounding conditions of ontological and social entropy where the surrounding environment appears unstable, corrupted and on the brink of rupture. Owing to profound uncertainty surrounding the what, where, how and who of violent atrocity, such methods succeed unleashing primal fear of the unmarked and unknown, creating more anxiety than manifestly greater threats possessing comprehensible form. As a result, accentuating the tactical and expressive role of routine objects and infrastructures within terrorism’s organising logic highlights its ability to instil unremitting fear by destroying citizens’ “taken-for-granted confidence” in the sociomaterial orders that facilitate and sustain their “personal and collective projects” (Goold et al 2013, 993). While it is somewhat cliché to acknowledge terrorism’s psychic and social disruptiveness and the extent to which it violently disturbs everyday reality, the defining contours, functions and effects of terrorists’ weaponization of daily life remain insufficiently plumbed. Engaging with these consequential, yet less noticed, dynamics assists in contextualizing the phenomenon’s propensity to beget alarm and implant deleterious thoughts about oneself, others and the world writ large. In the final instance, the ability to penetrate the familiar, deceive the senses and propagate perceptions of a parlous, unstable atmosphere presents an important means through which insurgents’ reach, influence and enigmatic presence are exponentially augmented. As an exploratory study, this paper’s findings are illustrative and suggestive, not definitive. Nonetheless, it is hoped that elevating such dynamics to a site of meaningful analytic engagement can provide new vistas and sightlines from which to evaluate terrorism’s disproportionate footprint and impact.