University of Chicago’s Interdisciplinary Conference on Violence

Violence may be a complex, wicked problem. Solutions to it are not necessarily true or false, just good or bad. It is a symptom and cause of other wicked problems like poverty, unemployment, education and social inequality—the topics worthy of “policies.” To solve wicked problems, policymakers and practitioners are increasingly intervening with integrated approaches that leverage the strengths of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners.

The basic needs approach to international conflict intervention is a great example of an integrated approach to a complex issue, as it confronts a wicked problem—the impact of violence on individual well-being—with multiple solutions. The effects of violence can be wicked: sometimes the stress and anxiety that pervasive violence induces can be treated through therapy, but, if the stress is related to unemployment, providing job training may also alleviate the problem. The combination of psychosocial and economic components, as well as contributions from teams of research psychologists, economists, and social workers, represents an emerging push for connections between practitioners and researchers from different disciplines when solving problems related to violence. The push is present in academia as well.

In October 2018, the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Colloquium hosted The Allure of Violence, a non-traditional academic conference that brought in over 70 attendees and speakers, ranging from anthropologists and artists to sociologists, eye-tracking tech developers, historians, psychologists, stage-choreographers, cognitive neuroscientists and least one true crime author.

“We were interested in how, when, and why people engage with violence,” said Coltan Scrivner, one of the conference organizers and a doctoral student in Comparative Human Development (CHD) at the University of Chicago. “If we can better understand why people are interested in violence, we can ask better questions about its role in society.”

Gabriel Velez, a fellow conference organizer and CHD student, emphasized the conference goal of raising questions about violence from diverse disciplinary perspectives, and felt they had succeeded.

“We made a concerted effort to bring together different voices,” said Velez.

While the speakers each brought a unique, complex motivation for attending, their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach that combined research and application was constant throughout.

“From childhood I’ve been trying to understand why violence occurs,” said Aliza Luft, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. “I work on genocide, and the motivation for my work is deeply personal—all four of my grandparents are Holocaust survivors. When I was young, I tried to make sense of it from a religious perspective. I wondered how God could exist if my entire family could be murdered. As I got older, I became interested in history and sociology. Considering things from multiple perspectives is at the heart of sociology… and [that is how I now] try to understand what motivates people to kill and how people adapt to violence over time.”

One speaker, Garland Martin Taylor, an artist-activist-researcher from the south side of Chicago, worked with Cathy Cohen of the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science on The Black Death Project. The goal of this collaboration was to understand the presence of death and violence in black communities, neoliberalism and new media. “We…try to understand the contours of Black death beyond the numbers,” (The Black Death Project).

Taylor brought Conversation Piece, his sculpture of a revolver emblazoned with the names of gun-victims in his neighborhood, to The Allure of Violence.

“I’m here because it’s a new place, and I wanted this conference to take a moment to acknowledge specific deaths,” said Taylor.

At a venue where the point is to talk, it brought silence.

“The gun and the death are the poetry,” said Taylor. “I use poetry to win hearts and then win votes.”

Others took a more inquisitive route to violence, but their approach was still interdisciplinary.

“Curiosity is why I do what I do—in an inductive way,” said Alan Fiske, Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. “Here is the pattern, and now how does it extend?” Fiske connected the evolved psychology of social relationships to culture and recently co-authored the book Virtuous Violence, an opus of ethnographic, historical, neurobiological and literary evidence that made the claim that social relationships motivate violence.

Based on decades of diverse research, his own and others, Fiske asserted that to reduce violence we need to change what is culturally accepted as violence, offering the concussion controversy in football as an example.

“Why can’t we publish the injuries alongside the score?” asked Fiske. “Sports commentators are often former athletes; why not have a doctor commenting as well? If people are made conscious of the consequences of violence, they won’t like it.”

To make them conscious, we must understand the motivations behind violence.

“If you don’t understand, how are you going to propose alternatives?” asked Fiske. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed, though. I can make very strong statements in an intellectual context, but not in a policy context. [Years ago] I came very close to staying in public health and policy, but then I thought ‘No, I can’t do it.’ Even though I’ve thought this through, I’m not sure I want to put millions of lives and dollars on this theory.”

Interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers and practitioners in wicked problem space may help to alleviate concerns like these and the general overwhelming nature of violence. By providing a forum for such collaborations to grow, The Allure of Violence and similar-minded initiatives may facilitate effective approaches to understanding violence and subsequent improvement and development of interventions and policies.

The conference occurred on Friday, October 10, 2018, and was funded by a grant through the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago.

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