Typologies of Violence in Contemporary Television

In times of apocalyptic despair, notions of grief (for worlds or possibilities lost), modalities of violence (structural and discrete, epistemological and concrete), and prospects for change (whether revolutionary or kinds of therapeutic resignation) have emerged as central focal points for how popular visual culture represents, thinks through and responds to political, environmental, moral, and spiritual catastrophe. While conceptualizations and archives of grief, violence, and change have long histories in established domains within visual art, television engages with these in increasingly novel ways, deploying well-worn televisual techniques, ranging from melodrama to procedural to comedy to parody. In this transdisciplinary roundtable, we are interested in the typologies and modalities of violence that stretch across disparate portrayals within television series and popular culture. By foregrounding a sort of continuum of violence, from the discrete (particular acts) to the structural (systemic violence), this roundtable aims explicitly to think about how notions of loss, revolutionary change, epistemological uncertainty, and therapeutic coping each respond to a broader archive of violence. Especially, we are interested in the increasingly bimodal and bidirectional way in which representations of violence are themselves sites of violence and sites of violence are themselves already somehow representational or theatrical in nature.