Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Who's behind the J-School graffiti?

There's another talk organized by the Dart Center at the J-School today (aside from the one on reporting on violence against women). It's about "Covering Trauma Victims" and it's at noon in the World Room. Someone overnight has gone around with big a red sharpie has crossed out all the "victims" and replaced with "survivors." This person obviously felt very strongly about this because he/she went and did this on most of the posters in the building.



The choice of words matters to many people. Survivor is meant to be more a more empowering term than victim, who has has things done to him/her rather than actively pulled through and been able to cope. Prof. Joe Cutbirth in class yesterday said he thought the term had been popularized in the 80s to refer to AIDS as well as domestic violence survivors.

A simple google search for survivor and victim doesn't yield much information about the history behind the linguistics. Anyone care to enlighten me?

UPDATE 10:15 am: a few emails later, the culprit has been found. It was Prof. Laura Muha who is organizing the event. She thought it would make people look at the poster again. Well, it worked for me!

1 comment:

Yian said...

nice reporting. I was curious too!