D.Rad: Exhibition Conceptual Framework

Abstract

One of the common threads woven through our project findings so far, and among all investigated organisations and individuals who engage with violent radicalisation, extremism and hate speech is the need to simplify a message of fear, pride and belonging. From nostalgic ideologies of British imperialism and collected notions of shared values and beliefs of authentic national identity and culture - to fear of losing such identities (- and a return in the imagination to a place that celebrated those values of community, solidarity and cohesion), similar messages emerge across all channels of extremism. The representation of self in all these contexts is essentially the same, namely that of a victim fighting back against a perceived threatening other.

The concept of the other highlights how groups and societies create a sense of belonging, identity, and social status by constructing social categories as binary opposites and is fundamental to the way in which we establish societal identity categories. Zygmunt Bauman argues that identities are set up as dichotomies: the opposite or deviation of the norm i.e. stranger is the other of the native. The enemy is the other of friend. Them is the other of ‘us’.

“The ‘other’ side depends upon the first side for its enforced isolation – and equally, the first depends on the other for its self-assertion” (Bauman 1991:14).

Such definitions of self and others have significance in that they are tied to rewards and punishment (which may be material or symbolic), with the prospect of benefit or loss as a consequence of identity claims (Okolie 2003:2). Elias and Scotson’s Established and Outsiders (1964[1965]), offers an understanding of positive and negative community group identities and the ‘forces’ involved to deny equal legitimacy to individuals of ‘othered’ groups. This is because identity means very little without the ‘other’. It is rarely claimed for its own sake and so, defining a group, defines others. In Goodall et al’s (2017) discussion of religious based us-versus-them contexts, individual religious beliefs are argued as less important than religious group belonging. Religious group belonging has more prominence, more importance than individual religious beliefs. In a similar sense cultural, political, and national group identity has the potential to have a stronger hold over the individual than their own individual cultural, political, and national beliefs or identity.