International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Encounters Between Violence and Media

Guest-edited by Anu A. Harju and Noora Kotilainen, this Special Section on Encounters Between Violence and Media offers new approaches on encounters between violence and media and how these are circulated, negotiated or contested, or altogether rejected. The Section brings together scholars from media and communication studies, social sciences, as well as the humanities, with contributions ranging from interrogations of the more visible and often spectacularized violence to the more invisible violence, for example, gendered violence and violence against marginalized groups. Drawing on the philosophical notion of recognition, the articles in this collection examine what kinds of frames of recognition are assigned to victims of violence, to perpetrators of violent acts, or indeed to different types of violence and injury. Thus, problematizing regimes of visibility as regimes of power, the authors ask in what ways are the different forms of violence obscured or absent from the media, but also which types of violence gain hypervisibility and what implications this has for recognition, on the one hand, and marginalization, on the other. With this collection, we ask what happens to conditions for recognition in the context of violence, suffering, and death when recognition’s mutuality and relationality are altered through mediation and distance? Or indeed, what potential for recognition might lie in our collective existence when faced with violence, given that the roots of recognition are social and embedded in communal life? 

With this thematic issue, we bring into the discussion of recognition real-life perspectives on violence in contemporary media contexts. The collection highlights the need to focus on the recognition of suffering and violence experienced by those often existing on the social margins. 

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on February 6, 2023. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 
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Encounters Between Violence and Media—Introduction 
Anu A. Harju, Noora Kotilainen 

Remembering January 29: The Québec City Mosque Shootings and the Struggle for Recognition  
Yasmin Jiwani, Marie Bernard-Brind’Amour 

“We Are One”: Mediatized Death Rituals and the Recognition of Marginalized Other
Tal Morse  

“You Will Never Hear Me Mention His Name”: The (Im)possibility of the Politics of Recognition in Disruptive Hybrid Media Events
Katja Valaskivi, Johanna Sumiala  

Echo of Experience: A Feminist Response to Racialization of Sexual Crime in the Hybrid Media Event 
Kaarina Nikunen

Trafficked Women in Press Journalism: Politics and Ambivalence in the Quest for Visibility
Tijana Stolic

Sticky Violence—Afterword 
Barbie Zelizer 

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Larry Gross, Editor  
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Anu A. Harju and Noora Kotilainen, Guest Editors

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