Witnessing victimization in prison is a relatively new area of research. Prison victimization research focuses on direct experiences of victimization and its attending consequences; however, studies have not focused on the vicarious victimization experiences of prisoners. Drawing from the prison victimization, witnessing/exposure to violence, and offender reentry literature, this study will investigate the link between witnessing victimization in prison and individual post-release outcomes. Using multivariate analyses, I examined the extent to which individuals witness victimization in prison and the effects of witnessing victimization on individual post-release outcomes using The Prison Experience and Reentry study, a longitudinal study of 1613 males residing in Ohio halfway houses. The findings suggest that a significant proportion of offenders witness victimization while incarcerated. Furthermore, witnessing victimization, particularly witnessing sexual victimization and stealing, was significantly related to post-release outcomes. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

By contrasting the uses of image-as-evidence and documentary-as-witness, this report challenges some of the maxims of documentary film studies and exposes the ways in which different forms of audiovisual media construct distant conflict. More specifically, the report analyzes a purposive case selection of videos/films related to the Syrian uprising: the first set of visual data includes a montage of 13 YouTube videos claiming to show the aftereffects of the 21 August 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria; the visual analysis in section two centers upon a selection of 15 short documentary films produced by the Syrian Abounaddara Collective. Theoretically, the study advances the value of witnessing in the re-envisioning of documentary film. My research demonstrates the relative weakness of both legalistic and journalistic approaches to depicting war that treat visual material primarily as recorded fact or evidence. In its place, the report advances a new form of documentary with a higher degree of interpretive acumen based on the "emergency cinema" model developed in Syria -- what I term "documentary-as-witness." / text

In this thesis, I will examine how objects are given narrative voices by memorial museum curators, and how these narrative qualities facilitate ethical and critical relations between museumgoers and traumatic histories. My two main points of contention arise out of these questions: 1. What does it mean for an object to be a witness in the context of trauma? 2. What might the material dimensions of witnessing accomplish in regards to museumgoers understanding of and ability to respond to their memorial museum experience? Instead of being silent witnesses to the past, I propose that objects can become contact points of ethical engagement and understanding when it concerns traumatic events in history. The ability and necessity of seeing objects as more than mere things to be manipulated by language and curatorial framing is crucial in cases of trauma, as they can become portals that can help overcome the “constitutive failure of linguistic representation in the post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam era” (Leys, p. 267f). This thesis will contribute to the theoretical and museological conversation concerning objects and their representation in the aftermath of trauma, with an emphasis on interobjectivity as a tool to combat consumptive empathy. Stressing the dialogic and relational functions of material witnesses will underscore the ultimate responsibility of the museumgoer to take on the role of secondary witness, a position that is perhaps fraught with unclear obligations, but is nevertheless crucial in the transmission of difficult histories. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-17 11:27:55.134

Some studies have shown that children who witness domestic violence against a family member or experience physical, emotional, or sexual abuse will often display behavioral risk factors such as increased suicidal ideation. Using social learning as the theoretical basis, this study examined factors that are associated with suicidal ideation in children of domestic violence, such as witnessing domestic violence, experiencing physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and experiencing abuse perpetrated by a parental figure. Results showed that while witnessing domestic violence alone did not affect suicidal ideation, the combination of witnessing domestic violence and being sexually abused was strongly associated with suicidal ideation, as was having a perpetrator who was a stepparent, and having a perpetrator who was a parental figure who threatened suicide and/or homicide. Implications for further research are addressed.

Children’s perceptions of the fairness of their filial responsibility was examined as a moderator between witnessing domestic violence and behavioral outcomes in children. Hierarchical Multiple Regressions revealed that children’s perceptions of the fairness of their family responsibility influenced the relation between the psychological violence in the household and child reports of internalizing behavior problems. Specifically, higher levels of psychological violence predicted higher levels of internalizing only under perceptions of unfair filial responsibility. In addition, increased levels of reported psychological violence in the household significantly predicted increased levels of mother-reported externalizing problems. Descriptive analyses revealed that for 12 of the 27 families all of the children had very small levels of reported behavior problems, as compared to the rest of the sample. These resilient families had lower level of psychological violence and physical violence in the household than the other families in the sample.

O percurso desta tese partiu de uma inquietação, decorrente do encontro com um processo de trabalho no campo da clínica das psicoses, referente à necessidade de que algo (relacionado ao trabalho clínico com a psicose) ganhasse passagem. No campo de produções na cultura, delineou-se a questão da pesquisa: a articulação entre uma vivência da dimensão do excessivo e a subsequente necessidade de produzir uma perda no campo do Outro, por meio da produção de um saber, de algo endereçável. Perguntamo-nos sobre os efeitos desses encontros com o excessivo, quando o sujeito estaria na condição de testemunha de uma vivência alheia que lhe chegaria através de produções culturais (orais, escritas, imagéticas) deles decorrentes. Buscamos, na psicanálise freudo-lacaniana, as articulações teórico-conceituais para sustentar a formulação relativa à (re)inscrição da disjunção, que separa e coloca em relação (ao modo de uma torção, como a da Banda de Moebius) os campos do sujeito e do Outro, e que teria se suspendido em uma vivência do excesso. Refletindo sobre a produção de um saber, trabalhamos com as noções de experiência, testemunho, transmissão e endereçamento, tomando, além de elementos da literatura de testemunho e de fragmentos da criação de filmes, a produção do CD com livreto Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia, do artista porto-alegrense Claudio Levitan. O percurso da pesquisa nos permitiu concluir que haveria uma peculiaridade nessas produções, a saber, a força da dimensão de permanência com que são dotadas, no sentido de replicar, naquele que as receberia, tanto a vivência de um excesso, quanto a necessidade subsequente de fazer algo com isso, de seguir inventando palavras. Dessa forma, o circuito se recolocaria: um novo saber se produziria e assim sucessivamente, da forma como a cada um fosse possível tornar própria uma experiência, transmitindo-a. / The path to this thesis arose from a certain disquietude due to encountering a work process in the field of clinic of psychoses, referring to need that something (related to clinic work with psychoses) gain passage. In the field of cultural production, the focus of the research was delineated: the articulation between living in the dimension of the excessive and the subsequent need of producing a loss in the field of the Other, by creating knowledge, something addressable. We asked ourselves about these encounters with the excessive, when the subject is in a condition of witness of somebody else’s experience which they would receive through cultural productions (orally, in writing, in imagery). We search, in freudian lacanian psychoanalysis, the theoretical-conceptual articulations to support the formulation relative to the (re)inscription of the disjunction, that separates and puts the subject and the Other in relation (as in the twisting of a Möbius strip), and that was suspended in during the experience of the excess. Reflecting upon the production of knowledge, we work with the ideas of experience, bearing witness, transmission and addressing, taking elements from the literature and fragments of movie productions, and also from the production of the CD and Booklet “Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia” from the artist from Porto Alegre, Claudio Levitan. The route that this research took, allowed us to conclude that these productions bear a peculiarity, which is the power of the dimension of permanence that they possess, in the sense of replicating, in the one that receives them, not only the experience of an excess, but also the subsequent need of doing something with it, to continue inventing words. Then, the circuit is repositioned: a new knowledge is produced and so forth, making it possible to make an experience one’s own, and transmit it forward.

This thesis examines how secrecy and absence shape the representation of covert counter-terrorism in the public sphere. Contemporary covert practices, from missile strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles to special forces 'kill/capture' operations, have come to exemplify U.S. counter-terrorism in public debate. This is significant because these practices shift the ethical stakes of witnessing state warfare. Previous scholarship on war and news media has argued that public glimpses of state violence, alongside official declarations, can demonise or dehumanise the targets of such violence, and thus prompt witnesses to accept the state's rationalisation of these actions and the use of secrecy. News coverage of contemporary covert action, however, offers no such glimpses. Instead, coverage draws primarily upon residue: the rumours and debris left behind. By applying this concept of residue to drone strikes, the special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and kidnap rescue efforts in the Sahara-Sahel, the thesis argues that it is all this speculation, rubble, and empty space, rather than the state itself, which signifies to newsreaders the possibility of state secrecy. That suspicion of secrecy then frames the absences in this residue, the conspicuous lack of certain bodies and objects. Secrecy makes those absences appear suggestive, in that the latter cannot publicly corroborate different aspects of these unseen events. This allows residue to intimate – to hint at unverifiable ideas about that which is absent, in a way which can undermine more explicit claims and justifications of what has taken place. To examine how this dynamic reframes the ethics of witnessing, the thesis develops an historical affiliation, a method of linking disparate practices of violence based on similar representational qualities, in order to examine whether witnessing is being shaped by these qualities in obscured or unspoken ways. This affiliation is made between representations of covert counter-terrorism and those of lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their differences, in both cases unseen violence and absent bodies are represented as significant in their being disconnected from wider society and difficult to comprehend, to understand how and why the violence takes place. This occurs in today's counter-terrorism through hints and allusions from absence, which represent these covert events as physically intangible. As with lynching, violence and its casualties are implicitly represented in their absence as reflecting the public's intellectual and moral distance from the practice. This takes covert counter-terrorism beyond a binary of fostering assent or dissent towards the state. Instead of prompting newsreaders' complicity with state narratives for its actions, residue intimates doubts and unspoken possibilities about these events that curtail their rationalisation. Insodoing, however, these representations marginalise the violence inflicted upon casualties from ethical consideration. They do so while obscuring how that marginalisation occurs, as newsreaders are prompted to see themselves as distanced from these events and to focus upon that distance, rather than on how absences are being given significance in the public sphere. Using the historical affiliation with lynching, the thesis concludes that an ethical witnessing of covert counter-terrorism through its residue cannot be based on an attempt to recognise and 'recover' lived experiences of suffering from rumours and debris. Rather, ethical witnessing would involve an awareness of how distance is constructed through that residue, and how this gives unspoken meaning to absence.

abstract: Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop analyzes the poetic forms used by four modernist American women poets to trace depictions of social oppression that are tied to specific landscapes. My focus is on what I term "environmental justice witnessing," which I define as accounts that testify to experiences of injustices that affect humans and the environments they inhabit. Integrating theories of witnessing, which to date have focused exclusively on humans, with environmental justice criticism, I fashion a lens that highlights the interconnectedness of social and environmental problems. In this way, I theorize the study of texts of witness and how they document the decay, disease, and exploitation of urban and rural landscapes in the twentieth century. In this dissertation, I focus on Lola Ridge's "The Ghetto" (1918), Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" (1938), Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca" (1968), and poems about Brazil from Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel (1965) and New Poems (1979). I argue that these women poets depict environmental injustices as an inherent facet of social injustice and do so by poetically connecting human bodies to environmental bodies through sound, diction, figurative language, and imagery. In Environmental Justice Witnessing, I expand arguments made by environmental scholars about the exchange of environmental elements among humans, animals, and landscapes to include the way poets reflect this transfer poetically. The poetry of Ridge, Rukeyser, Brooks, and Bishop allows me to investigate the ways the categories of race, gender, and class, typically thought of as human qualities, are integrally tied to the geographic, national, and cultural bounds in which those categories are formulated. This argument has clear implications on the study of poetry and its environmental contexts as it invites discussions of the transnational conceptions of global citizenship, examinations of the relationships among communities, the environment, and overarching power structures, and arguments surrounding the ways that poetry as art can bring about long-term social and environmental awareness. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

O percurso desta tese partiu de uma inquietação, decorrente do encontro com um processo de trabalho no campo da clínica das psicoses, referente à necessidade de que algo (relacionado ao trabalho clínico com a psicose) ganhasse passagem. No campo de produções na cultura, delineou-se a questão da pesquisa: a articulação entre uma vivência da dimensão do excessivo e a subsequente necessidade de produzir uma perda no campo do Outro, por meio da produção de um saber, de algo endereçável. Perguntamo-nos sobre os efeitos desses encontros com o excessivo, quando o sujeito estaria na condição de testemunha de uma vivência alheia que lhe chegaria através de produções culturais (orais, escritas, imagéticas) deles decorrentes. Buscamos, na psicanálise freudo-lacaniana, as articulações teórico-conceituais para sustentar a formulação relativa à (re)inscrição da disjunção, que separa e coloca em relação (ao modo de uma torção, como a da Banda de Moebius) os campos do sujeito e do Outro, e que teria se suspendido em uma vivência do excesso. Refletindo sobre a produção de um saber, trabalhamos com as noções de experiência, testemunho, transmissão e endereçamento, tomando, além de elementos da literatura de testemunho e de fragmentos da criação de filmes, a produção do CD com livreto Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia, do artista porto-alegrense Claudio Levitan. O percurso da pesquisa nos permitiu concluir que haveria uma peculiaridade nessas produções, a saber, a força da dimensão de permanência com que são dotadas, no sentido de replicar, naquele que as receberia, tanto a vivência de um excesso, quanto a necessidade subsequente de fazer algo com isso, de seguir inventando palavras. Dessa forma, o circuito se recolocaria: um novo saber se produziria e assim sucessivamente, da forma como a cada um fosse possível tornar própria uma experiência, transmitindo-a. / The path to this thesis arose from a certain disquietude due to encountering a work process in the field of clinic of psychoses, referring to need that something (related to clinic work with psychoses) gain passage. In the field of cultural production, the focus of the research was delineated: the articulation between living in the dimension of the excessive and the subsequent need of producing a loss in the field of the Other, by creating knowledge, something addressable. We asked ourselves about these encounters with the excessive, when the subject is in a condition of witness of somebody else’s experience which they would receive through cultural productions (orally, in writing, in imagery). We search, in freudian lacanian psychoanalysis, the theoretical-conceptual articulations to support the formulation relative to the (re)inscription of the disjunction, that separates and puts the subject and the Other in relation (as in the twisting of a Möbius strip), and that was suspended in during the experience of the excess. Reflecting upon the production of knowledge, we work with the ideas of experience, bearing witness, transmission and addressing, taking elements from the literature and fragments of movie productions, and also from the production of the CD and Booklet “Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia” from the artist from Porto Alegre, Claudio Levitan. The route that this research took, allowed us to conclude that these productions bear a peculiarity, which is the power of the dimension of permanence that they possess, in the sense of replicating, in the one that receives them, not only the experience of an excess, but also the subsequent need of doing something with it, to continue inventing words. Then, the circuit is repositioned: a new knowledge is produced and so forth, making it possible to make an experience one’s own, and transmit it forward.

O percurso desta tese partiu de uma inquietação, decorrente do encontro com um processo de trabalho no campo da clínica das psicoses, referente à necessidade de que algo (relacionado ao trabalho clínico com a psicose) ganhasse passagem. No campo de produções na cultura, delineou-se a questão da pesquisa: a articulação entre uma vivência da dimensão do excessivo e a subsequente necessidade de produzir uma perda no campo do Outro, por meio da produção de um saber, de algo endereçável. Perguntamo-nos sobre os efeitos desses encontros com o excessivo, quando o sujeito estaria na condição de testemunha de uma vivência alheia que lhe chegaria através de produções culturais (orais, escritas, imagéticas) deles decorrentes. Buscamos, na psicanálise freudo-lacaniana, as articulações teórico-conceituais para sustentar a formulação relativa à (re)inscrição da disjunção, que separa e coloca em relação (ao modo de uma torção, como a da Banda de Moebius) os campos do sujeito e do Outro, e que teria se suspendido em uma vivência do excesso. Refletindo sobre a produção de um saber, trabalhamos com as noções de experiência, testemunho, transmissão e endereçamento, tomando, além de elementos da literatura de testemunho e de fragmentos da criação de filmes, a produção do CD com livreto Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia, do artista porto-alegrense Claudio Levitan. O percurso da pesquisa nos permitiu concluir que haveria uma peculiaridade nessas produções, a saber, a força da dimensão de permanência com que são dotadas, no sentido de replicar, naquele que as receberia, tanto a vivência de um excesso, quanto a necessidade subsequente de fazer algo com isso, de seguir inventando palavras. Dessa forma, o circuito se recolocaria: um novo saber se produziria e assim sucessivamente, da forma como a cada um fosse possível tornar própria uma experiência, transmitindo-a. / The path to this thesis arose from a certain disquietude due to encountering a work process in the field of clinic of psychoses, referring to need that something (related to clinic work with psychoses) gain passage. In the field of cultural production, the focus of the research was delineated: the articulation between living in the dimension of the excessive and the subsequent need of producing a loss in the field of the Other, by creating knowledge, something addressable. We asked ourselves about these encounters with the excessive, when the subject is in a condition of witness of somebody else’s experience which they would receive through cultural productions (orally, in writing, in imagery). We search, in freudian lacanian psychoanalysis, the theoretical-conceptual articulations to support the formulation relative to the (re)inscription of the disjunction, that separates and puts the subject and the Other in relation (as in the twisting of a Möbius strip), and that was suspended in during the experience of the excess. Reflecting upon the production of knowledge, we work with the ideas of experience, bearing witness, transmission and addressing, taking elements from the literature and fragments of movie productions, and also from the production of the CD and Booklet “Minha Longa Milonga – 12 Canções para Keidânia” from the artist from Porto Alegre, Claudio Levitan. The route that this research took, allowed us to conclude that these productions bear a peculiarity, which is the power of the dimension of permanence that they possess, in the sense of replicating, in the one that receives them, not only the experience of an excess, but also the subsequent need of doing something with it, to continue inventing words. Then, the circuit is repositioned: a new knowledge is produced and so forth, making it possible to make an experience one’s own, and transmit it forward.