Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This paper investigates the political possibilities and limitations of compassion. My aim is to consider how and under what conditions compassion is elicited and whether such emotions can institute social transformation. Whilst compassion is understood to be located in political and cultural contexts, this paper investigates the extent to which compassion shapes those contexts in terms of political imaginaries. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu I consider the ways that compassion positions people in relations with ‘sufferers’ affectively, including shaping perceptions and understandings of causes and effects. To illustrate this I examine visual representations of drug use, one from a Barnardo's child poverty advertising campaign and the other a photo-ethnography of drug suffering. Focusing on the imagery of the syringe as a moving device I show how the object reworks the affect of compassion in ways that require critique and contestation.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ash

, (2008), ‘“Heroin Baby”: Barnardo's, Benevolence, and Shame’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32 (2): 179–200.

Berlant

, (1997), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Berlant

, (1998), ‘Poor Eliza’, American Literature, 70 (3): 635–668.

Berlant

, (2004), ‘Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)’ in Berlant

(ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, London and New York: Routledge.

Binford

, (2002), ‘Violence in El Salvador: A Rejoinder to Philippe Bourgois's “The Power of Violence in War and Peace”’, Ethnography, 3 (2): 201–219.

Boltanski

, (1999), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu

, (1990), The Logic of Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu

, (1999), The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourgois

, (1995), In Search of Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

Bourgois

, (2002), ‘The violence of moral binaries: Response to Leigh Binford’, Ethnography, 3 (2): 221–231.

11.

Bourgois

and Schonberg

, (2009), Righteous Dopefiend, Berkeley: University of California Press.

12.

Cartwright

, (2008), Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

13.

Dean

C.J.

, (2004), The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

14.

di Leonardo

, (2000), Exotics at Home: Anthropology, Others, American Modernity, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

15.

Edelman

, (2004), No Future, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

16.

Fitzgerald

, (2002), ‘Drug photography and harm reduction: Reading John Ranard’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 13: 369–385.

17.

Gomez

, (1997), Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

18.

Humphries

, (1999), Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs and the Media, Columbia: Ohio State University Press.

19.

McRobbie

, (2002), ‘A Mixed Bag Of Misfortunes?: Bourdieu's Weight of the World’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (3): 129–138.

20.

Nunn

, (2004), ‘Emotional Death: The charity advert and photographs of childhood trauma’, Journal for Cultural Research, 8 (3): 271–292.

21.

Oritz

A.T.

and Briggs

, (2003), ‘The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies and Welfare Cheats. The Making of the “Healthy White Baby Crisis”’, Social Text, 21 (3): 39–57.

22.

Schonberg

and Bourgois

, (2002), ‘The politics of photographic aesthetics: Critically documenting the HIV epidemic among heroin injectors in Russia and the United States’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 13: 387–392.

23.

Spelman

, (1997), Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering, Boston: Beacon Press.

24.

Vitellone

, (2004), ‘Habitus and social suffering: Culture, addiction and the syringe’ in Adkins

, and Skeggs

(eds), Feminism After Bourdieu, Oxford: Blackwell.

25.

Wilkinson

, (2005), Suffering: A Sociological Introduction, London: Polity.

26.

Woodward

, (2004), ‘Calculating Compassion’ in Berlant

(ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, London and New York: Routledge.

27.

Woodward

, (2009), Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotion, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Contesting Compassion

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References