scholarly journals Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-642
Author(s):  
CARRIE RENTSCHLER
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
High Rise ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

scholarly journals Femicide in media

Temida ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Zorica Mrsevic
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Aspects ◽  
Media Reports

Media in Serbia explain femicide usually as caused by poverty and alcoholism. This style is gender blind and socially stereotyped because of neglected gender aspects of male violence against women. Particular problem is lack of problematizing obvious social ?permission? of male violence. Femicide is regularly presented as an incident, allegedly impossible for anticipation rather than tragic epilogue of long lasting male violence against women which as such exists as a part of traditional gender social relations and roles. Media overlook that alcohol and poverty may only contribute to intensification of already existing, widely accepted domination of men and subordination of women. Media reports as a rule didn?t enter deeper into problems of institutional and social context in which is perpetrated long lasting violence as prefacing femicide. Media also never criticize the social behavior of neighbors, relatives and all others informed on the domestic violence, but rather avoid ?mixing?into privacy matters. Thus violence escalates without barriers, eventually developed in femicide, murder a woman, victim of this, decades long lasting violence.

Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2245-2260 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Chung
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Rural Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper investigates rural Chinese migrants’ agency through their multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies. The idea of ‘multi-positionality’ conceptualises a migrant’s mobility between physical locations and shifting social positions. Through individual migrants’ multi-positionality, this study discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse way to negotiate a living in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. These strategies include simple approaches such as facilitating physical movements between different locations and more sophisticated ones which develop multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. While the former allows individual migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, the latter further cultivates changes and an upgrade in social relations. Rural migrants' everyday stories are used to unfold an individual’s particular people–place relationship and how he/she has tapped into a place-specific resource to make a living. It does not aim to generalise rural migrants’ experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Migrants’ stories are collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, China. Through these stories, not only does this paper articulate the social relations which underlie individual migrants’ shifting positions, but also extends translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of physical locations.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood open spaces for social cohesion

2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 06019
Author(s):  
Rukhsana Badar ◽  
Sarika Bahadure
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Unitary Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Neighbourhood Level ◽  
The City

The global cities of the world are witnessing a visible disconnection of everyday life. In India the Smart City guidelines acknowledge the need to counter the growing social detachment and intolerance by encouraging interactions. They go further in identifying that preserving and creating of open spaces must be a key feature of comprehensive urban development. Most social relations are cemented within open spaces at the neighbourhood level. Previous studies examine the association between the attributes of neighbourhood open spaces and social activity but neglect to view the issue comprehensively. The present study turns to Lefebvre’s Unitary Theory which states that open space is a result of three forces; 1) perceived space which is the physical dimension and material quality identifiable by the senses; 2) conceived space created by planners and other agents as plans and documents; and 3) lived space which is shaped by the values attached and images generated through user experience. For open space conducive to social interactions these three aspects must work in tandem. With this consideration a framework of criteria and indicators is developed and used to measure and compare the open spaces in select neighbourhoods in Europe and India. The investigation thus reveals differences in all three aspects of neighbourhood spaces. It also reveals a discrepancy between the planning standards formulated and employed by the city authorities in providing the spaces and the actual needs of the community. The research aims to address this gap. The study of the Indian cases lays foundation for the use of the framework to measure open spaces in association with social cohesion and thereby contribute to the enhancement of the social infrastructure of the City.

Legal Reform and Social Construction: Violence, Gender, and the Law

1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 829-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Frohmann ◽  
Elizabeth Mertz
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social

As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.

Risking Debt for Honor

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Cash
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Urban Migration ◽  
Long Term Stability ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rural Urban Migration ◽  
The Republic

Research on godparenthood has traditionally emphasized its stabilizing effect on social structure. This article, however, focuses attention on how the practices and discourses associated with marital sponsorship in the Republic of Moldova ascribe value to the risks and uncertainties of social life. Moldova has experienced substantial economic, social, and political upheaval during the past two decades of postsocialism, following a longer period of Soviet-era modernization, secularization, and rural–urban migration. In this context, godparenthood has not contributed to the long-term stability of class structure or social relations, but people continue to seek honor and social respect by taking the social and economic risks involved in sponsoring new marriages.

scholarly journals Srebrenica is not a Metaphor

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Sarina Bakić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Further Development

The author will emphasize the importance of both the existence and the further development of the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center, in the context of the continued need to understand the genocide that took place in and around Srebrenica, from the aspect of building a culture of remembrance throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). This is necessary in order to continue fighting the ongoing genocide denial. At first glance, a culture of remembrance presupposes immobility and focus on the past to some, but it is essentially dynamic, and connects three temporal dimensions: it evokes the present, refers to the past but always deliberates over the future. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the concept of the place of remembrance, the lieu de memoire as introduced by the historian Pierre Nora. In this sense, a place of remembrance such as the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center is an expression of a process in which people are no longer just immersed in their past but read and analyze it in the present. Furthermore, looking to the future, they also become mediators of relations between people and communities, which in sociological theory is an important issue of social relations. The author of this paper emphasizes that collective memory in the specific case of genocide in and around Srebrenica is only possible when the social relations around the building (Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center) crystallize, which is then much more than just the content of the culture of remembrance.

Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

Urban renewal and citizenship: the quality of life in British cities, 1890-1990

Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Meller
Keyword(s):  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Social Responses ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper juxtaposes two key themes: the concept of citizenship and ideas on urban renewal over the past century. The aim is to explore the interaction of cultural changes and the physical environment of cities. The concept of citizenship represents a cultural response to social change which itself has changed dramatically over the past century. Urban renewal has taken many forms. Yet behind all the growing technical expertise in dealing with the physical environment, there are specific social responses to the city which legitimize action. By looking at citizenship and urban renewal together, it is possible to establish a perspective on how the urban environment has been manipulated over the past century, often in ways which have barely interfaced with the social demands of many sections of the community.

The Sustainable Development of Ecological High-Rise Building Design

2011 ◽  
Vol 71-78 ◽  
pp. 465-469
Author(s):  
Bai Tao Mao
Keyword(s):  
Building Design ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
High Rise ◽  
High Rise Building ◽  
The Social ◽  
Special Symbol ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

A city high-rise building of the environmental balance, and its prominent position in the image and the place has a special symbol. However, high-rise buildings developed to reduce the symbolic value that it has attributed to the relevant system of architectural forms. As more and more dense urban high-rise buildings stand, we should be carefully evaluated: its ecological evvironment, will be the effect? Because of its height and volume, a high-rise building than in the top or bottom is likely in terms of physical environment on the social environment and the impact is much greater. Disturb the existing high-rise buildings in varying degrees between the various functions of the city, increasing the city high-rise buildings in the moment, how to properly control the rapid of high-rise buildings in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem, is a question worth considering.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document