Violence - “Cultural Carolina” Graduate Student Conference
Violence surrounds us, sometimes visibly (in times of conflict and wars, directly or mediated through images), and sometimes invisibly, as part of a statistic. With the increasingly extremist rhetoric on parts of the US political spectrum, the so-called “culture wars,” violent hate crimes against LBTQ+ people have surged in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pacific-Asians and Asian-Americans were targeted because of xenophobia and conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were met with violent responses from authorities. Additionally, mass and school shootings hit an all-time high for two years in a row between 2021 and 2022.