Sites of resistance

death row homepages and the politics of compassion

Ezra Tessler

pp. 125-150

in: Leonidas K. Cheliotis (ed), Roots, rites and sites of resistance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Contemporary forms of state-sanctioned violence present a stark challenge to understanding the place of empathy and moral solidarity in modern society (Ginzburg, 1994; Sznaider, 1998; Moyn, 2006). A vast body of ethnographic research on social suffering points to the consequences of cultural practices that place certain people outside the realm of human category (Scheper-Hughes, 1997; Glover, 1999; Das and Kleinman, 2001). All too often, these practices prove central to garnering public consent for state-sanctioned policies of violence. To combat these effects, sociologists like Iain Wilkinson highlight the potential for the mass media to engender amongst members of the public a greater imagination of the suffering of others (Wilkinson, 2005: 15). Wilkinson's point is that people's mediated experiences of suffering play a central role in what he calls "the politics of compassion" (ibid.: 6, 92).