Event and Victimization

This article contributes to recent existentialist interventions in critical criminology (see Lippens and Crewe 2009) and offers the existential concept of ‘event’ as a guiding image for critical victimology. Whereas existential criminologists have examined crime and wrongdoing, very little attention has been given to victimization. I utilize the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano to offer a critique of existing approaches to victimization within mainstream criminology and develop an evential analytic to understand the event of victimization. This paper brings together existential philosophy and victimology to offer an alternative approach to victimization. I engage with the ‘problem of number’ in conventional victimology and offer a critique of quantitative approaches to victimization based on the unsubstitutability and singularity of existence. Through a discussion of selfhood and embodiment from an evential standpoint, this paper moves beyond existing victimological approaches to identity. I also consider the relationship between victimization and trauma. In the final section of the paper I carve out an alternative research agenda through a discussion of bearing witness and events of victimization.     

Dynamics of Polarizing Rhetoric in Congressional Tweets

Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members.