PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

»Ausarbeitungen von Gewalt. Über narrative Erklärungen und ihre audiovisuellen Daten«. Today, researchers can make use of an immeasurable wealth of visual and audiovisual data to analyze instances that they consider as violent. Thus, this paper focuses on the question of how audiovisual data specifically contribute to making violent phenomena visible and thereby ex- plaining them, but discusses it from a specific epistemological standpoint, which can be roughly outlined as an interest in how social phenomena in gen- eral and violent events in the narrower sense can be narratively interpreted and explained. To this end, it reflects on a case study on the so-called Charlie Hebdo Attacks in Paris in January 2015. The results are two arguments that might appear somewhat counterintuitive. First, stories are for sure an obvi- ous methodological device for working on narrative explanations. However, like the term narrative, it is far too broad and misleading a category. It there- fore makes sense to refrain from working on explanatory stories and to focus methodologically “only” on emplotments. Closely related to this, audiovisual data – secondly – then have a particular analytical status in the research pro- cess. While they are also, especially in violence research, considered as some- thing with which much more detailed analyses are possible than without them, this is not necessarily the main point for the narrative analysis of vio- lent emplotments. Here, they enable first of all the discovery of crucial hap- penings that shape a plot. In this way, audiovisual data are decisive in not im- posing stories on an event that follow modern narrative conventions rather than exploring the factual causation of the event.