Dynamics of violence: social influence and situational interaction

In my research on the emergence of physical violence I study both individual and collective violence. I examine a multitude of factors that contribute to violence and examine their causal relationship to violent outbreaks.. In my current book project on school rampages, I am focusing on one of the most drastic forms of youth violence in the educational context. The project examines questions such as: Why do perpetrators decide to go on a killing spree out of all possible courses of action? What role do interactions with peer groups, families, and teachers play for the shooting? What role do changes in the US education system and cultural factors, such as the US gun culture, play? And how do situational interactions during the attack affect rampages? I study perpetrators’ life courses, motivations, as well as situational dynamics of a full sample of school shootings.

In my project on officer-involved shootings in the US, I study the role of racial bias and situational interaction in leading to shootings. Data collection and analysis for this project was conducted during my one-year research stay at Yale University (2019&2020) and funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Recent publications on violence in the school context include my article "The Interactional Pathways of Mass Killings: Toward a novel understanding of rampage school shootings” published in Symbolic Interaction as well as "School Shootings - The Social Dynamics of Mental Disorder", published in the Research Handbook on Society and Mental Health. Further publications in the field of violence include my article Two Processes of Dehumanization: an in-depth study of racial biases in real-life officer-involved shootings of black citizens." Published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, as well as my article "Situation, Context, and Causality - On a Core Debate of Violence Research" in Violence: An International Journal..

Collective behavior and rule-breaking

In this research field, I explore how collectives, in particular larger crowds of people, break rules. I study different levels of rule breaks, from low-threshold rule-breaks to more severe cases such as protest violence. I analyze how interactions, emotional dynamics, interpretations, use of space, or quorums impact dynamics of rule breaking. In one project, I aim to  explore collective rule-breaking on different scales from the perspectives of sociology, neurosciences, behavioral biology, and theoretical physics with my colleagues Marcel Brass, Jens Krause, and Pawel Romanczuk (all HU Berlin). A recent publication includes our article “Collective rule-breaking” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. In our article “Situational Social Influence Leading to Non-compliance with Conservation Rules”, William Arlidge et al. also applied this microsociological research perspective on rule-breaking to nature conservation.

In my ongoing research on protest violence, I focus on group dynamics that lead to escalation. Recent publications include my book “Situational Breakdowns: Understanding Protest Violence and Other Surprising Outcomes” (Oxford University Press) and my article “’Whose streets? Our streets!’: Negotiations of Space and Violence in Protests”, published in Social Problems.

Video Data Analysis

Since 2013, Nicolas M. Legewie (University of Erfurt) and I explore how rapidly developing video and communication technology, prevalent filming of social life, and sharing on online platforms is transforming the possibilities of video-based social science research. Whether through mobile phone footage, body-worn cameras, videos from public surveillance, or self-recorded videos, researchers have access to an ever-expanding pool of data on real-life situations and interactions. We build a multidisciplinary framework for how to use these videos in a systematic, transparent, ethical, and meaningful way in the social sciences.

Current publications from this project include our 2022 book “Video Data Analysis - How to Use 21st Century Video in the Social Sciences” (SAGE Publications) and our forthcoming special issue on Video Data Analysis in Sociological Methods and Research.

On our homepage (VideoDataAnalysis.com), we collect relevant information on VDA, regularly post resources and news, and provide a list of empirical and methodological publications on video-based social research. On our VDA YouTube Channel we start collecting talks on VDA.