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In order to sustain our argument that a blending of visual sociology and the sociology of development can be productive and politically engaged, we need to locate the debate in the wider developmental context into which sociological interventions can be made. As this chapter will demonstrate, popular understandings of development, mostly mediated by visual imagery, reflect a rapidly changing development industry, as well as affording significant social theoretical insights. Thus, we need to briefly consider some of the key features of the development landscape, and the ways in which sociologists might engage in this, particularly in the context of the globalisation of development; the ways in which processes of globalisation are transforming the actors and agents involved in development, the roots of development authority and legitimacy and the changing ways in which development is defined and understood. This already hints at an important link with the visual; “development” must be understood as being linked to the same processes and relationships which underpin a world increasingly shaped by the visual image.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the complex interplay between the media, school shootings and society from the perspective of mediatization of the victim. In mediatization of the victim, the media, in a crisis, plays a key role in connecting people, disseminating information, compiling a security-related picture and providing for potential new emergencies.

Design/approach – The chapter draws on Winfried Schulz's (2004) typology for the analysis of mediatization of the victim in the multidimensional manner. It examines how mediatization works in practice by applying Schulz's typology in the analysis of the two school shootings in Finland in Jokela in 2007 and in Kauhajoki in 2008. The empirical material consists of interviews with police, state and municipal officials and people from non-governmental organizations. Media materials (electronic and print) were collected from the major Finnish media houses and several state and community official web sites.

Findings – The chapter argues that the media shapes the construction of the victim in the process of mediatization and makes the role of victim and witness both central and ambiguous. The chapter concludes by drawing upon the work of French sociologist Luc Boltanski (1999) on morality, media and politics as it identifies the ways in which mediatization engages the affective potential of the spectator and evokes a specific disposition to act upon the suffering, thus, creating a moralizing effect on the spectator.

Originality/value – The chapter produces new theoretical and empirical knowledge on the complex interplay between the media, school shootings and society by discussing it from the perspective of the victim. Consequently, it contributes in deepening our understanding of the process of mediatization and the place of the victim in it in the case of violent crisis such as school shootings.

This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.

This paper shows that terrorism reduces bilateral trade flows, in real terms, by raising trading costs and hardening borders. Countries sharing a common land border and suffering from terrorism trade much less than neighboring or distant countries that are free of terrorism. The impact of terrorism on bilateral trade declines as distance between trading partners increases. This result suggests that terrorism redirects some trade from close to more distant countries. Our findings are robust in the presence of a variety of other calamities, such as natural disasters or financial crises.

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

Nineteenth-century animal protectionists endeavored to frame laws that gave animals direct legal protections, and they conducted large-scale public education campaigns to define the harm of cruelty to animals in terms of animals’ own suffering. However, animal suffering was only one of the many possible definitions of cruelty's harms, and when judges and other legal interpreters interpreted animal protection laws, they focused less on animal suffering and more on human morality and the dangers of cruelty to human society. Battling over the definition of human guilt for cruelty, protectionists and judges drew and redrew the boundaries of the law's reach and the moral community.