The aim of this book, by providing a set of conceptual tools drawn from critical theory, is to open up questions and new problems and new research agendas for the study of environmental politics.

COVID-19 has caused far-reaching humanitarian challenges. Amongst the emerging impacts of the pandemic is on the dynamics of human trafficking. This paper presents findings from a multi-methods study interrogating the impacts of COVID-19 on human trafficking in Sudan—a critical source, destination, and transit country. The analysis combines a systematic evidence review, semi-structured interviews, and a focus group with survivors, conducted between January and May of 2021. We find key risks have been exacerbated, and simultaneously, critical infrastructure for identifying victims, providing (...) support, and ensuring accountability of perpetrators has been impeded. Centrally, the co-occurrence of the pandemic and the democratic transition undercut the institutional and governance capacity, limiting the anti-trafficking response and exposing already vulnerable groups to increased risks of human trafficking. Findings point to increased vulnerabilities for individuals with one or more of the following identities: migrants, refugees, females, and informal labourers. (shrink)

There is a kind of living that feels like dying. There is a kind of life marked—relentlessly—by death. The term social death refers to this experience, this rhythm, this walled passage. By definition, social death may belong to whoever—or indeed whatever—lives and dies in a network of relation. Even when conceived of only anthropocentrically, then, the term must apply beyond that, because the human being lives and dies in nonhuman relation. Moreover, social death (...) always occurs out of sync with physical death. As such, its temporality is unique. Social death is already and not yet, long begun and never finished, and one is never quite sure when it will strike; it is out of time. Given the way in which it eddies across existences and temporalities, social death is a chimerical, though no less powerful term. (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability (...) to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

: Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

This chapter develops the hypothesis that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when a genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders. The evil of genocide falls not only on men and boys but also on women and girls, typically unarmed, untrained in defense (...) against violence, and often also responsible for care of the wounded, the sick, the disabled, babies, children, and the elderly. The damage of war and terrorism is commonly assessed in terms of its ruin of individual careers, body counts, statistics on casualties, and material costs of rebuilding. An injustice becomes an evil when it inflicts harms that make victims' lives unbearable, indecent, or impossible, or that make victims' deaths indecent. (shrink)

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s (...) previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery. (shrink)

Confronting evils pulls the minds and hearts in several directions. This chapter focuses on acute cataclysmic events that shock people into awareness, or chronic corrosive evils that damage the agency and dull the attention. It also focuses on those who commit grave wrongs, or those who suffer them. Claudia Card's work has offered a steady focus on the experiences and needs of survivors of atrocities and grave wrongs. The chapter explores what Card's most recent work suggests about perpetrators, that is, (...) about the moral risks of participating in evil. Obvious atrocities include terrorism, torture, forced starvation, slavery, rape, and genocide; these each involve many grave wrongs. Card's concepts of social vitality and social death make sense of such cases, enabling us to see a perpetrator's act as a particular destruction of a survivor's world. Social vitality is important for each of us, in all phases of the lives. (shrink)

Understanding evil requires both addressing the grave wrongs done to the victim and addressing the perpetrator who does these wrongs. Claudia Card's concept of social vitality was developed to explain what génocidaires destroy in their victims. This essay brings that concept into conversation with perpetrator testimony, arguing that the génocidaires’ desire for their own social vitality, achieved through their destruction of the social world of their targets, in fact boomerangs to corrode the vitality of their own lives. (...) This is true whether they succeed or fail in their genocidal project. Card's recent analysis of “being a badass” is brought to bear on the cultivation of evil, and the essay suggests four strategies for meeting Card's “moral challenge of avoiding evil responses to evil.”. (shrink)

Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black (...) life. Specifically, this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

Social death is apparent when people are considered unworthy of social participation and deemed to be dead when they are alive. Some marginalized groups are more susceptible to this treatment than others, and one such group is people with dementia. Studies into discrimination towards older people are well documented and serve as a source of motivation of older people’s social movements worldwide. Concurrently, theories of ageing and care have been forthcoming in a bid to improve the (...) quality of responses to older people in times of need. Included in this theorizing has been the analysis of values and approaches that paid carers convey to citizens who require their help. In this article, the values and approaches of social workers and mental health nurses bring to people with dementia are considered within the context of social life and social death. It is based on a small study that undertook to critically examine how participation of people with dementia was facilitated. A thanatological lens was used to interpret inclusive and exclusive practices which potentially create opportunity for participation or reinforce the loss of citizenship for older people with dementia. (shrink)

Slovenes of African descent find themselves in a calculus of biopower. This points to the precariousness of life (or flesh), which is deemed as less “worthy.” We are at a historical moment in which Afro-pessimism offers a “realistic” glimpse into the past and future of Blackness in the White supremacist contexts of the West, due almost solely to the enormity of systemic violence that Black flesh has endured. In light of this very real political urgency, there is a very real (...) need for security, which in the short term might best be accomplished through concepts such as identity and authenticity. However, Afro-Slovene acts of living reject in passing the priorities that “progress” evokes through the standardization of Euro-normalizing biopolitical orders and slip the categories used to confine them to a limited form of existence. This analysis focuses on the Afro-Slovene insistence on living otherwise as a form of resistance to the tyranny of linear progressive subjectivities, without shedding responsibility for the need to confront race and racism head on. (shrink)

This paper examines how photography shaped the American public’s perception of psychiatric hospitals during the immediate post-WWII period. I will analyze photographs that appeared in popular exposé articles of that period and that used photography as a visual aid for disclosing the poor conditions of state hospitals, intending to promote reform efforts focused on turning antiquated asylums into modern hospitals. Existing scholarship has mentioned how these photographs had a significant influence on shaping the public’s view of asylum conditions. Through a (...) close examination of these photographs, I will argue that they often contained unintentional messages which stigmatized disabled people. (shrink)

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as (...) the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized. (shrink)

The work of Claudia Card has received far less attention in the field of genocide studies than it deserves. The atrocity paradigm, first introduced in her book by that title published in 2002, offers rich insights that can serve to enhance the understanding of genocidal violence. Her book Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, after offering revisions to her secular theory of evil, does speak directly to the evils of genocide, claiming "genocide is social death". This chapter shows that (...) genocide scholarship as well as accounts of genocide by journalists often frame genocide in terms of biological death and body counts. It argues that the atrocity paradigm and especially Card's conception of social death are better able to capture the complex realities of genocidal violence, particularly the experiences of women. The chapter describes that the idea of social death enriches the understanding of genocide but question whether her term has juridical implications. (shrink)

The reissue of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death provides an opportunity to reflect on developments in studies of slavery, postcolonial sociology, and comparative-historical sociology since the book’s initial release in 1982. In this special issue of Theory and Society, contributors from ancient history, anthropology, and sociology examine the book’s broader intellectual significance by situating it in Patterson’s corpus, covering a range of works including his fiction and scholarly publications, early work on Jamaican slave revolts, and private correspondence (...) with key thinkers. The volume’s ambit, then, is not a single book but rather a broader field of social thought. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the concepts and theories introduced by Patterson are still vital. In some ways, we argue, a Pattersonian sociology has only recently come to its full fruition, thanks to ongoing developments in postcolonial studies, critical race studies, anthropological and historical study of slavery, globalization studies, and feminist theory. (shrink)

Movements for environmental justice ought to engage the powerful mechanisms of change deployed in a Transitional Justice context. There is reason for restraint, however, in calling upon radically disruptive procedures to immediately amend the basic structure of society. I propose a modest expansion of the purview of Transitional Justice to recognize a class of environmental harms severe enough to trigger transitional measures. This class of harms is ecocide as social death, which I define as deliberate, state-sponsored environmental destruction (...) resulting in the annihilation of ways of life intimately connected to the natural world. The article then considers potential criticisms of this framework: its foundation in liberal political theory, its anthropocentrism, and its exclusion of global environmental harms. Despite being anthropocentric, the model offers a means of politically and legally representing the value of the natural world beyond its role as a stock of resources for human consumption. I defend an expressly liberal approach to Transitional Justice that emphasizes the core of the liberal social contract—respect for diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing (...) these poems straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence (...) controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding, I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science. (shrink)

Lately there has been increased attention to the philosophical issues that death raises, but the focus remains individualistic. Death is philosophically puzzling. Death is thought to be bad for the individual who dies, but there is no one there to experience death as a harm. In this paper I argue that the harm of death is a social harm. Of course, social relationships are fundamentally changed when any member of a social group (...) dies. Death is harmful for those left behind. The problem is not just that social relations are harmed by the loss of a loved one. The very meaning and value of our lives and projects are shaped by social relations. By recognizing death as a social harm that many animals, human and nonhuman, experience, we may be better prepared for the work of mourning. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that Hegel holds the view that a rational social order needs to reconcile us to our status as natural beings, with bodily needs and desires. But while this general view is...

Much public policy analysis requires us to place a monetary value on the bad- ness of a premature human death. Currently dominant approaches to determining this ‘value of a life’ focus exclusively on the ‘self-regarding’ value of life — that is, the value of a person’s life to the person whose death is in question — and altogether ignore effects on other people. This procedure would be justified if, as seems intuitively plausible, other-regarding effects were negligible in comparison (...) with self-regarding ones. I argue that in the light of the issue of overpopulation, that intuitively plausible condition is at best highly questionable. Unless the world is in fact underpopulated, the social disvalue of a premature death is likely to be significantly lower than the current estimates. (shrink)

Road traffic injury and deaths (RTID) are an important public health problem in Kenya, primarily affecting uneducated and disenfranchised people from lower socioeconomic groups. Studies conducted by Kenyan experts from police reports and surveys have shown that pedestrian and driver behaviors are the most important proximal causes of crashes, signifying that the occurrence of crashes results directly from human action. However, behaviors and risk factors do not fully explain the magnitude of RTID neither does it account for socioeconomic gradient in (...) RTID. Instead, a social justice approach to RTID highlights the need for emphasizing distal causal factors. They allow us to understand how social inequities determine risk for RTID. Hence, designing policies that focus on behaviors will simply mask the underlying systemic causes of this growing phenomenon. To eradicate the RTID and address the gradient, a broader policy framework that includes the social dimension of injury, a strong political will to address the underlying causes of RTID and an effective partnership with stakeholders needs to be developed. (shrink)

Is shame dead? With personal information made so widely available, an eroding public/private distinction, and a therapeutic turn in public discourse, many seem to think so. People across the political spectrum have criticized these developments and sought to resurrect shame in order to protect privacy and invigorate democratic politics. Democracy and the Death of Shame reads the fear that 'shame is dead' as an expression of anxiety about the social disturbance endemic to democratic politics. Far from an essential (...) supplement to democracy, the recurring call to 'bring back shame' and other civilizing mores is a disciplinary reaction to the work of democratic citizens who extend the meaning of political equality into social realms. Rereadings from the ancient Cynics to the mid-twentieth century challenge the view that shame is dead and show how shame, as a politically charged idea, is disavowed, invoked, and negotiated in moments of democratic struggle. (shrink)

In this article I describe the implicit conceptualization of social order which exists in Death Stranding — localized in both the setting and the mechanics of the game — and compare it with the conceptualization of Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan”. First, the theoretical tension between Death Stranding and “Leviathan” is traced: the speculative conceptualization of the Leviathan and the procedural conceptualization of Death Stranding are compared by clarifying the role that the concepts of action, authorization, right and (...) sovereignty play in Hobbesian theory and the video game. Sec­ondly, the theoretical tension between the political and natural capacities of the Sovereign according to Hobbes is explicated; with the help of mate­rial from Death Stranding, a variant of its resolution is proposed, suggest­ing the conceptualization of the Sovereign-without-a-body: an instance devoid of physical capacity and materiality, yet still capable of maintaining social order as a product of its activity. Subsequently, attention is paid to the mechanics of state expansion in Death Stranding: I describe and analyze how the Sovereign-without-a-body’s messenger — the protagonist of the video game — interacts with people outside the Sovereign’s zone of influ­ence, convincing them to consent to return to the commonwealth. This theoretical move makes it possible to supplement Hobbes’s binary scheme of the state of nature and commonwealth with a third concept — the state of memory, in which the memory of the Sovereign turns out to be a deci­sive factor influencing whether the commonwealth will be restored to its former boundaries. By explicating the Hobbesian theory of imagination, I demonstrate that — in the state of memory — the Sovereign is contingent, not fully defined, and virtual. (shrink)

How can otherwise normal, moral persons - as citizens, voters, and jurors - participate in a process that is designed to take the life of another? In DEATH BY DESIGN, research psychologist Craig Haney argues that capital punishment, and particularly the sequence of events that lead to death sentencing itself, is maintained through a complex and elaborate social psychological system that distances and disengages us from the true nature of the task. Relying heavily on his own research (...) and that of other social scientists, Haney suggests that these social psychological forces enable persons to engage in behavior from which many of them otherwise would refrain. However, by facilitating death sentencing in these ways, this inter-related set of social psychological forces also undermines the reliability and authenticity of the process, and compromises the fairness of its outcomes. Because these social psychological forces are systemic in nature - built into the very system of death sentencing itself - Haney concludes by suggesting a number of inter-locking reforms, derived directly from empirical research on capital punishment, that are needed to increase the fairness and reliability of the process. The historic and ongoing public debate over the death penalty takes place not only in courtrooms, but also in classrooms, offices, and living rooms. This timely book offers stimulating insights into capital punishment for professionals and students working in psychology, law, criminology, sociology, and cultural area studies. As capital punishment receives continued attention in the media, it is also a necessary and provocative guide that empowers all readers to come to their own conclusions about the death penalty. (shrink)

"In Applied Ethics and Social Problems Tony Fitzpatrick presents introductions to the three most influential moral philosophies: consequentialism, Kantianism ...

In this article, the importance of ritual as a collective response to death is discussed. A case example, taken from a larger ethnographic study, is used to explore the responses and reactions of a group of Italian nurses to death as it occurs within an intensive care unit in Rome, Italy. The material presented is used to analyse the significance that cultural, religious and social beliefs and quasi‐beliefs can have in nursing practice. The issues highlighted in this (...) examination of the place of ritual in death are located and discussed within their highly specific cultural context and suggest that, where emphasis remains on nurses as a collective rather than on the individual nurse, ritual acts to ensure that social and moral order prevails. (shrink)