Brief Announcement on the subject of Violence
After having written in every edition of the Menton student newspaper Le Zadig last year and facilitating a collaboration between the journal and the Feminist Union, I’ve decided that it’s high time I become a columnist.
Having been profoundly impacted this summer by my work with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, I recently proposed a column on the subject of Violence in All His Forms. Today I found out I was accepted!
As it is a subject familiar to me, the first ‘form’ of violence I will explore in my column would be gun violence, including international violent crime. After that, I want to move on to survey religious violence, structural violence, psychological violence, social violence, and cultural violence. My aim with these is to make them as relevant and responsive as possible to the present conversations occurring on our campus. I will look at larger topics and trends in violence, as well as smaller instances and cases within these columns.
The subject of violence must be taken seriously, but people (even at a political science university) cannot be asked to take the writings of a nineteen year old so gravely. Part of my mission with this column is to make fun of my self, my opinions, and my experiences (or lack thereof), in order to engage with hard-to-swallow topics.
My other motivation-my motivation at large- for looking at violence as a particular theme is to explore it as a gendered concept. To many, violence is a masculine phenomenon. While this is not an idea that I agree with entirely, I do think it is an one worth exploring, and by including the gendered nature in the title of my column I hope to run a philosophical cord through the column, and examine various perspectives on how we intentionally and unintentionally apply gender to large concepts like violence.
I believe the nature and forms of violence are worth exploring throughout the year, and I sincerely hope you agree, and will look out here and on their site for upcoming pieces!
Thank you all fo ryour support.