Project description
Understanding escalating violence in public spaces
Violent confrontations between the police and the public, or within communities themselves, are statistically infrequent. However, the effects of a single encounter can linger for a lifetime for those involved. It can also change how entire neighbourhoods view safety and authority. For instance, videos and images shared on social media can inflame public fear and outrage. Additionally, excessive use of force by police erodes trust in democratic institutions. The ERC-funded TURNING VIOLENT project will analyse phone-camera videos recorded in Paris, London, and Berlin. Its goal is to trace how ordinary public disputes escalate into physical violence, often against vulnerable individuals. The project builds a theory of how violence emerges, and how it might be prevented.
Objective
Although violent police-civilian and civilian-civilian encounters constitute a tiny sliver of the social interactions that take place each day, their consequences can be far-reaching. Images of assailants committing ‘bestial’ violence against vulnerable victims arouse public fear and indignation, while the excessive use of force by police undermines public trust, cooperation and the rule of law in democratic societies. Depicting such violence as ‘senseless’ moreover obscures the fact that violent action has meaning to the assailants. Based on the granular analysis of 126 publicly available phone camera recordings of real-life interpersonal conflicts in Paris, London and Berlin, the research program will advance an empirically grounded theory that explains how non-violent altercations between strangers in public space develop into encounters in which physical violence is the dominant mode of interacting, especially one-sided violence against vulnerable/subdued victims. The program breaks new scientific ground by: (1) showing that episodes of interpersonal conflict can be causally explained by understanding how the antagonists and their audiences (co-present peers, colleague police officers, unknown bystanders) structure their interactions in culturally meaningful ways; (2) analysing how slurs, insults, and provocations pertaining to race, ethnicity, class, gender and age as well as differences in policing practices influenced the trajectories of civilian-civilian and police-civilian conflicts; (3) developing the methods of ethnomethodological/conversation analysis to transcribe and analyse in meticulous detail how sequences of bodily actions and verbal utterances become turning points towards the beginning, transformation, and ending of violence; and (4) advancing the scientific use of now ubiquitous phone camera data.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands
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