Show Time: Posthumously published book by UTM’s Lee Ann Fujii tackles political violence
December 6, 2021
Three and a half years ago, UTM and the scholarly community tragically lost Professor Lee Ann Fujii at the age of 56. At the time, she was nearing completion of a book on what she called “violent display.” This year, Lee Ann is in a limited sense back with us, as her final book Show […]
Lee Ann Fujii Award
February 21, 2019
We were happy to learn this week that The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods (IMM) Conference Group of the American Political Science Association announced the creation of “Routledge’s Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence.” The award, funded by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, is to be given to books, journal articles […]
APSA Grant to Honour Lee Ann Fujii
September 25, 2018
At the 2018 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, a group of Lee Ann Fujii’s friends and colleagues – including Stephanie McNulty, Nicholas Rush Smith, and Robin Turner – launched a fundraising effort in her honour. Recognizing her extraordinary impact on the discipline through her scholarship and her mentorship, her colleagues decided to […]
Remembering Lee Ann Fujii (1962 – 2018)
March 5, 2018
We were deeply shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of Associate Professor Lee Ann Fujii, an exceptionally vibrant and much-loved member of the Political Science community, who died on March 2nd this year, at just 56. A highly respected scholar of political violence, ethnicity, race, African politics, and field methods, Lee Ann was born […]
Lee Ann Fujii awarded a 2013-14 Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship
April 30, 2013
Professor Lee Ann Fujii has been awarded a fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. Next year, she will be one of 19 visiting scholars based at the Foundation. “The Russell Sage Foundation is the principal American foundation devoted exclusively to research in the social sciences. Located in New York City, it […]
Lee Ann Fujii receives a Ford Foundation Fellowship
April 24, 2013
Lee Ann Fujii has just been awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Professor Fujii’s host institution for the fellowship will be Rutgers University under the mentorship of Professor Mary Hawkesworth. The Ford Foundation Fellowship awards “are made to individuals who, in the judgment of the review panels, have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a […]
Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display
In Show Time, Lee Ann Fujii asks why some perpetrators of political violence, from lynch mobs to genocidal killers, display their acts of violence so publicly and extravagantly. Closely examining three horrific and extreme episodes—the murder of a prominent Tutsi family amidst the genocide in Rwanda, the execution of Muslim men in a Serb-controlled village in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars, and the lynching of a twenty-two-year old Black farmhand on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1933—Fujii shows how “violent displays” are staged to not merely to kill those perceived to be enemies or threats, but also to affect and influence observers, neighbors, and the larger society.
Watching and participating in these violent displays profoundly transforms those involved, reinforcing political identities, social hierarchies, and power structures. Such public spectacles of violence also force members of the community to choose sides—openly show support for the goals of the violence, or risk becoming victims, themselves. Tracing the ways in which public displays of violence unfold, Show Time reveals how the perpetrators exploit the fluidity of social ties for their own ends.
Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach
What is interviewing and when is this method useful? What does it mean to select rather than sample interviewees? Once the researcher has found people to interview, how does she build a working relationship with her interviewees? What should the dynamics of talking and listening in interviews be? How do researchers begin to analyze the narrative data generated through interviews?
Lee Ann Fujii explores the answers to these inquiries in Interviewing in Social Science Research, the latest entry in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. This short, highly readable book explores an interpretive approach to interviewing for purposes of social science research. Using an interpretive methodology, the book examines interviewing as a relational enterprise. As a relational undertaking, interviewing is more akin to a two-way dialogue than a one-way interrogation. Fujii examines the methodological foundations for a relational approach to interviewing, while at the same time covering many of the practical nuts and bolts of relational interviewing. Examples come from the author’s experiences conducting interviews in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the United States, and from relevant literatures across a variety of social scientific disciplines. Appendices to the book contain specific tips and suggestions for relational interviewing in addition to interview excerpts that give readers a sense of how relational interviews unfold.
This book will be of great value to graduate students and researchers from across the social sciences who are considering or planning to use interviews in their research, and can be easily used by academics for teaching courses or workshops in social science methods.
Academic News
July 14, 2015
Congrats to Professors Peter Loewen, Christopher Cochrane and Lee Ann Fujii on receiving tenure, effective July 1, 2015. They are now recognized as Associate Professors.
Exploring Violence and Peace in Divided Societies
April 6, 2015
Several of the Department’s faculty members will be acting as discussants for the Munk School’s upcoming workshop put on ‘Exploring Violence and Peace in Divided Societies’. This workshop has been organized by Professor Jeffrey Kopstein and will take place April 13th at the Munk School for Global Affairs, Room 108 North. The workshop will feature […]