The “Muslim Extremist” ’s Invisible Relative: How to Trace the Silent Violence that Informs Our Lives?
Public Talk by Professor Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria
Thursday, 2 November 2017, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM | Room LEC 1, Humanities Center, University of Alberta
Abstract: In a world of corporate media, social networks, breaking (bad) news, the propagated images of “Muslim extremists” and their brutal atrocities serve the global powers in the West with facile justifications for military interventionism and regime changes. What is often missed in such a contrast is the way in which extremist violence in fact overshadows the structural, institutional, and hubristic forms of violence that define our globalized civilization defined by formal democracies, the upholding of human rights, and market rationality. My tripartite concept of violence is intended to bring to the light the endemic but silent violence that permeates every aspect of our civilizational lives. It exposes how we have internalized and accepted many forms of violence as necessary, inevitable, or even desirable.
Bio: Peyman Vahabzadeh is Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (2003), A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (2010), Exilic Meditations: Essays on A Displaced Life (2012), Parviz Sadri: A Political Biography (2015), and Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursion into Phantom Opposites (2018), and the editor of Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice: Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism (2017).
