In the last few decades, violent extremism has become an increasing challenge for Western countries with the rise of Islamist, far-right and environmental extremism amidst other phenomena such as the incel movement in response to social changes. Since 9/11, Islamist and latterly far-right extremism have been the focus of government counter-terrorism policy and interventions due to the threat to life and social order posed, with much research focused on how to address these challenges. Factors implicated include individual vulnerabilities, mental health, the role of groups, social factors such as poverty and inequality that result in grievances, the role of social media and the role of government interventions and policies that inadvertently fuel extremism.

While research has focused on individual factors and social factors, I am curious about the interaction between the two in facilitating extremism. I am conducting a qualitative study combining psychotherapy and Dialogical Narrative Analysis to explore how trauma and adversity influence identity in extremism engagement. I am working with former extremists from the far-right and Islamist groups and incels to explore their life stories. Therapy acts as a space where people can explore their lives and if interested, address the psychological consequences of life events that shaped their extremist engagement. I am curious about how this understanding and new perspective changes the story people tell about themselves, others and the world. In particular, who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’, given that othering and dehumanisation of outgroups are key factors in extremism. I hope to share some early observations.

Self-harm has long been a stigmatised and misunderstood practice, but our collective (mis)understandings of it developed rapidly during the 1990s. In this decade, self-harm began to be depicted in popular media in new ways and with increasing frequency, and this cultural emergence aligned with an increased interest in self-harm in clinical literature; together, these different ways of knowing were crucial in establishing our current understandings of self-harm in the 21st century. This study examines depictions of self-harm in popular films from before, during and after the 1990s in order to understand how self-harm was constructed in the popular imaginary. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and feminist-psychoanalytic film critiques are used to interrogate the relationships between self-harm, sexual difference, the body and the abject in film and the culture at large.

Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to authority” experiments are well known for seeming to demonstrate a proclivity for extreme violence amongst ‘ordinary people’. Participants were found to have followed a fake scientist’s experimental instructions even as they turned into manifest acts of violence. However, the long-lasting fame of the experiments has not simply been due to their demonstration of violence: volunteers’ electrocuting a fellow human despite protests or screams of pain. Crucially, this violence has been depicted by Milgram, as well as virtually everyone since him, as a result of volunteers’ free choice. This was not an act under coercion, but of freely chosen obedience to an authority perceived as “legitimate”.

However, Milgram also described volunteers as under “extraordinary tension”, suggesting that the popular image of “blind obedience” is not valid. Volunteers, instead, acted against their own will. Is it possible, then, that the fake experimenter did something in the lab which amounted to coercion? Not for Milgram, who ultimately located such stress and its resolution firmly inside the mind of participants. And not for all subsequent critics or advocates of Milgram, who by and large neglected participants’ “extreme stress”.

The present paper is based on an event by event coding of 136 of sessions in the “Obedience to authority” series. It will show, first, that Milgram’s fake experimenter was not silent during the sessions, but intervened regularly. Second, that such interventions in both obedient sessions and during the obedient phase of eventually disobedient sessions were very minimal in form. And third, that although such interventions were minimal in form, their illocutionary function was of a violent nature: deleting participants as human beings. As such, the paper concludes by hypothesising that instead of allowing for free choice the situation in which Milgram’s volunteers were operating an atmosphere of “coercive control”.

This paper will briefly outline the idea of that there are acts of violence that can be usefully understood in terms of ‘public violence’. Notable acts of public violence might be acts of terrorism, school shooter incidents, and celebrity assassinations.

Whilst many acts of violence can be characterised as emerging from quite intimate forms of conflict; mostly male violence directed towards those who very directly threaten their sense of masculinity and identity. For example, the most common forms of homicide occur when men attack other men who appear to represent a threat to their ‘reputation’ (Gilligan 2003), or women who they feel threatened by and whom they are in, or have been in, sexual relationship with (Polk 1996 ).

On the face of it acts of public violence appear very different: aimed at quite abstract targets whom the victim does not know at all, and often carried out by people who have had very different backgrounds from those more likely to be caught up in ‘intimate violence’. The notion that such acts of violence might be importantly shaped by ‘the public sphere’ is briefly explored in order to provide some context for the symposium.