Slow violence and nonviolence: Violence, affect, and everyday schooling
Loading...
Citations
Altmetric:
Altmetric::
Download
Associated Records
Authors
File Licence
Editors
Date
2024-05
Source Title
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Melbourne Authors
Affiliation
Faculty of Education
Document Type
PhD thesis
Subject Code
Citation
Access Status
Open Access
DOI
Access URL
Open Access URL
Open Access at PMC
Linked Resource URL
NHMRC Grant Code
ARC Grant Code
Description
© 2024 Leanne Higham
Abstract
This study explored the concept and practices of slow violence in two coeducational government secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia. School violence, and how we respond to it, tends to be framed narrowly and fails to capture violence enacted in other ways. Mobilised by prior affective encounters with subtle and enduring violences in schools, I took up ethology, the study of affects, to work deliberately with the problematic concept of violence. I explored how the notion of slow violence might expand existing understandings of violence in schools, and how such an expanded conceptualisation might advance an ethics of nonviolence.
Understood ethologically, violence causes curtailment of powers to act. In seeking to study slow violence in two very different schools, I developed ethological ethography, a distinctive approach which centred studying affectual processes in situ through affective attunement. Fieldwork occurred over seven weeks in each school and involved cultivated attention to everyday school life, speaking with students and staff, and mapping feelings about school spaces. Attending to the schools’ affective ecologies of slow violence, my study showed how affects connected to, constrained, and enabled the capacities of those therein. It also lifted into view each school’s distinctive practices of anti-violence, counter-violence, and nonviolence.
I argue that school violence is typically approached in narrowed ways that do not account for the complexities of how violence might be at work within a school, meaning other violence can be missed. Broader relational approaches, such as those afforded conceptually by slow violence, and nonviolence, offer a way to engage with and respond to complex violence which unfolds over time. Ethology provides a way to locate and understand complex affectual relations of power in the world, including violence. I argue, the concepts of slow violence, nonviolence, and affect offer the potential to address the affective registers of schools’ slow violence, and to do so in ways that go beyond current narrowed practices of intervention.
This thesis offers critical insights into violence that is usually overlooked in studies of school violence, providing a fresh way of looking at longstanding, intangible problems in schools. It builds on relational traditions to challenge highly individualised notions of violence, including the received view of violence as subject-centred and human-centred, and offers new perspectives into how proximity and in/visibility affect how schools respond to slow violence. The study extends scholarship on the notion of affective dissonance by illuminating how ‘affective consonance’ can obscure slow violence. It provides close examination of the differences between anti-violence and nonviolence. Lastly, it imagines possible directions for future studies of slow violence, nonviolence, and affect in educational contexts.
Notes
Terms of Use
Keywords
slow violence, nonviolence, ethological ethography, affect, ethics