Dr. Jannis Julien Grimm
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Talking Violence

 

RESEARCH PROJECT - Talking Violence

Talking violence

Contested concepts and ethical representations of violent dynamics

The language employed by researchers to grasp an increasingly violent reality in Gaza has become a space of contestation. While analytical categories, such as genocide, self-defense, terrorism, or resistance, do not necessarily imply a normative position on the events of October 7 or the war in Gaza, in public debates they have become loyalty tests for those who employ them. Symptomatic for a war of position over hegemonic narrative, disputes over the vocabulary to describe what is happening in Palestine and Israel have hindered scholars in their ability to provide analytical depth to public debates. Hardly anywhere has this been as pronounced as in Germany.

Against the backdrop of shrinking spaces for critical inquiry, this project explores the multi-perspectivity in debates about violent dynamics in Gaza and beyond. It centres the responsibility of scholars to oppose an expanding semantic void when it comes to the language that can be used to legitimately analyse violence dynamics, and their duty to defend an ethical representation of violence that respects the experiences of those affected by it. This responsibility, we argue, is based on two foundations: 1) academic integrity, that is, the imperative to name, explain, and contextualize violent phenomena independent of political calculations; 2) the ethical commitment of researchers to convey the lifeworld of their research subjects in terms of the meanings they attribute to it, without applying linguistic filters that distort or correct these meanings.

The overarching goal of this projetc is thus 1) to discuss the contestation of specific language and vocabulary to legitimately describe and explain suffering and violations observed by researchers, 2) to consider ethical implications of scientific speaking and writing on violent phenomena, and 3) to shed light on the role of public and private meaning-making processes in conditioning the semantic space for addressing violence dynamics.

Articles in the frame of this project: