Abstract
Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) temporal, 2) spatial, and 3) experiential features of social problems, we facilitate comparisons of different kinds of movements across distinct historical periods and regions. The approach is demonstrated via the example of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011)—suffering that develops gradually across time and extends across space as well as disproportionately afflicts disempowered people. A comparison of two very different historical cases—environmental justice advocacy in the wake of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India and consumer activism in early twentieth-century America—illustrates how slow violence presents parallel issues with respect to representing the problem and identifying the culprits. On this basis, the argument demonstrates parallels among disparate social movements by including the analysis of the phenomenological structure of social problems into comparative studies of framing work in movements. As such, this article presents analytical possibilities for incorporating experiences of social problems into the study of framing work and social movements.
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Notes
I use “constructivist” to denote approaches that stress the work activists put into framing social problems. Thus, to talk of social problems does not imply something self-evidently objective, natural, and uninterpreted. There is always some basic interpretation at play. But the constructivist emphasis on framing work must incorporate problems as activists interpret and experience them rather than divorce them from framing work and stress the latter at the expense of the former.
Barbara Adam’s work on timescapes (1998) is a partial exception to which I return in the conclusion.
It is no easy task to demarcate spectacular problems from mundane ones. Consider some problems associated with racism in the United States. Some tend toward the self-evidently spectacular (e.g., police violence; urban uprisings). But these problems also have more mundane and historical roots (e.g., “micro-aggressions,” de jure and de facto segregation, slavery, institutional racism, etc.). Rather than adjudicate that issue here, I think researchers can take their cues about the character of these problems from the activists and movements under study. After all, the phrase “phenomenological structure of social problems” admits that these problems come to us already interpreted. Problems are not separate from framing work, but analytic emphasis on their relevance to framing work will yield new ways to connect framing to broader social tendencies and processes.
Broughton suggests that the epidemiological data are likely to “under-represent the true extent of adverse health effects because many exposed individuals left Bhopal immediately following the disaster never to return and were therefore lost to follow-up.”
The claims of victims were in the range of 3 billion and also included criminal charges, which were dismissed by the Indian Supreme Court.
It may be worthwhile to investigate the differences between attritional suffering that is connected to some spectacular event (e.g., Union Carbide disaster) and attritional suffering without that same connection (e.g., living in a polluted shantytown). For present purposes, I focus on the connection between the attritional character of slow violence and the representation of ongoing suffering.
The extent to which one can still speak of the effects of methylisocyanate today is a matter of great uncertainty. Some doctors and researchers are dismissive, while others speak of insufficient evidence owing to the political climate around Bhopal research from the very beginning (Mukerjee 2010, pp. 131–157).
Nixon also includes international and intranational timelines. It is unclear why we should treat these as temporal and not spatial. Further, the argument does not depend on their inclusion.
The tense is adjusted for readability. The original passage reads: “I would be less than candid if I did not admit that many of us at Union Carbide were outraged by the Indian government’s apparent indifference to the plight of the Bhopal victims. From the first day, we had been moved by compassion and sympathy. We believed that the company’s position was responsible and fair. We could not understand why the government did not promptly distribute the relief funds to the victims” (Browning 1993).
For analytical clarity, I confine my discussion to the US-based National Consumers’ League but the other groups dealt with similar problems.
These documents come from the following archives: The Records of the National Consumers’ League, National Archives, Washington, DC; and the Consumers’ League of New York City, Cornell University, Cornell, NY.
These maximum hours laws and the Muller case offered the NCL and other reformers an opportunity to circumvent the Lochner v. New York decision (1905). In that case, the court had ruled that maximum hour laws violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. This “laissez faire” interpretation of due process entailed an unrestricted right to freedom of contract, which Oliver Wendell Holmes noted in one of the dissenting opinions.
This is an analytical distinction. In practice, one would expect many instances of slow and spectacular violence to occur in tandem, as the example of Bhopal demonstrates. If we want to identify the potential consequences of social problems for framing work, we must be prepared to work with such analytical moves, even if only provisionally.
To my mind, the most crucial feature of this argument is the call for research that folds the study of social problems into the study of framing work. If this is to be effective, we will have to distinguish social problems in terms of how they appear or surface. Slow violence is a helpful notion with which to begin, but others may identify cross-cutting and more analytically promising notions. This will become clearer with more systematic investigation.
Like Nixon, Beck, and many others, Adam identifies this problem of invisibility as specially connected to environmental hazards. At the same time, she recognizes the affinities between the modern temporal perspective and the rise of capitalist market forces: industrialization, commodification, growth imperatives, and calculative practices, among others (1998, pp. 62–98). For a recent, historical perspective that reveals similar connections via the notion of cheapness in a capitalist world-system, see (Patel and Moore 2017).
Historian Thomas Haskell argues that the extension of the market could have supplied moral preconditions for the development of a humanitarian sensibility. This includes the recognition that one is causally implicated in the suffering of others. On moral conventions and the historical development of capitalism, see Haskell 1985a, 1985b. For a critique that embeds the humanitarian sensibility in the dynamics of imperial expansion and religious differentiation, see Stamatov 2013.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jeff Haydu for not laughing me out of the room as I developed the argument and for detailed comments on an early draft. I am also grateful to Michael Berman, Rick Biernacki, Jeff Guhin, Ian Mullins, Kelly Nielsen, Tien-ann Shih, and Sam Stabler for their generous and trenchant advice, even when I didn’t take it. Finally, Karen Lucas, the Editors of Theory & Society, and several anonymous reviewers provided thoughtful recommendations for clarifying the argument.
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Skotnicki, T. Unseen suffering: slow violence and the phenomenological structure of social problems. Theor Soc 48, 299–323 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09343-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09343-7