Overview

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence . An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship with other countries, some overcoming family associations with genocide in their second country of nationality to do so. This is life in the UK today. How then are things still continuing as ‘normal’? How can we confront these phenomena and why do we so often refuse to? What are the practices that help us to accommodate the unconscionable? How might we contend with the horrors that meet us each day, rather than becoming desensitized to them? Violent Ignorance sets out to examine these questions through an understanding of how the past persists in the present, how trauma is silenced or reappears, and how we might reimagine identity and connection in ways that counter - rather than ignore - historic violence. In particular Hannah Jones shows how border controls and enforcement, and its corollary, racism and violence, have shifted over time. Drawing on thinkers from John Berger to Ben Okri, from Audre Lorde to Susan Sontag, the book questions what it means to belong, and discusses how hierarchies of belonging are revealed by what we can see, and what we can ignore.

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9781786998620

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Reviews

A powerful, lyrical and very timely demand to confront difficult truths about past and present. Violent Ignorance is a brilliant demonstration of how to harness sociology to the pursuit of justice, that will inspire scholars and activists alike. - William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry and Nervous States. In our time of coordinated undermining of thoughtfulness, Hannah Jones reminds us of what is at stake when we turn away and do not care to know. Ranging across varieties of careless violence, this is a work that pushes us to reclaim humanness as connection and intimacy, because otherwise pretended ignorance may destroy us all. - Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya, University of East London To call this a wakeup call might imply that society slumbers in innocence. More accurately, in Violent Ignorance, Hannah Jones makes an emergency citizen's arrest. In this urgent analysis and prosecution of our times, Jones demonstrates how the evils of the world don't just happen and there is nothing natural nor inevitable about man's inhumanity to man. Violent Ignorance should be required reading for all those in power and an essential text for those seeking to take and share it. - Shami Chakrabarti

A powerful, lyrical and very timely demand to confront difficult truths about past and present. Violent Ignorance is a brilliant demonstration of how to harness sociology to the pursuit of justice, that will inspire scholars and activists alike. - William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry and Nervous States. In our time of coordinated undermining of thoughtfulness, Hannah Jones reminds us of what is at stake when we turn away and do not care to know. Ranging across varieties of careless violence, this is a work that pushes us to reclaim humanness as connection and intimacy, because otherwise pretended ignorance may destroy us all. - Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya, University of East London To call this a wakeup call might imply that society slumbers in innocence. More accurately, in Violent Ignorance, Hannah Jones makes an emergency citizen's arrest. In this urgent analysis and prosecution of our times, Jones demonstrates how the evils of the world don't just happen and there is nothing natural nor inevitable about man's inhumanity to man. Violent Ignorance should be required reading for all those in power and an essential text for those seeking to take and share it. - Shami Chakrabarti

Author Information

Dr Hannah Jones is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She writes, researches and teaches on racism, belonging and migration, and on critical public sociology. She is lead co-author of Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017), co-editor of Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location (2014), and author of Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government (2013) winner of the BSA Phillip Abrams Prize for best first book in UK sociology.

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