Ethics of Violence Seminar

Amy Schwartzott is Associate Professor of Art History at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University where she is Curator of University Galleries. Dr. Schwartzott’s research interests include artists who utilize recycled materials in their art as a tool for peace and post-conflict resolution. Continuing research in Mozambique resulted in awards from the U.S. Fulbright program, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship and the Fulbright IIE Fellowship. Her most recent publication is “Unraveling and Welding Together: War’s Transformative Influence on Contemporary Mozambican Art,” in The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Aid in African Crises (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Dr. Schwartzott has curated exhibitions nationally and internationally in Cape Town, South Africa and Maputo, Mozambique, serves on the editorial board of ‘African Performance Review,’ the African Theatre Association’s flagship publication, and serves as a grant reviewer for the national Fulbright competitions and participates in the yearly Advanced Placement Art History Reading each summer.  

Dr. William T. Cavanaugh

The common idea that religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence depends on a sharp distinction between the religious and the secular that, in reality, is fluid and often ideologically motivated.  I will explore the history and ideology behind the idea that religion has a proclivity for violence, and show how that idea has been used to justify violence on behalf of supposedly secular actors. 

Dr. Amy Schwartzott

Because of Mozambique’s protracted history of war, the Transforming Arms into Plowshares/Transformação de Armas em Enxadas (TAE) Project was established to heal, memorialize, and prevent further wars through its promotion of peace as weapons are dismembered in order to remember. Artists create sculptures utilizing recognizable parts of destroyed arms to evoke memories of violence from Mozambique’s long and painful past wars. Because meticulous care is taken to preserve the previous lives of these objects’ materiality, viewers are clearly able to distinguish between recognizable pieces of arms, particularly from the ubiquitous AK-47 - its magazines, handguards, gas pistons, recoil springs, triggers, trigger guards and buttstocks and other weaponry.

Theoretical frames fundamental to this investigation draw heavily from Igor Kopytoff’s seminal essay, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” focused on an object’s transformation from its initial use through its many lives. Conceptually, this introduces the important artistic technique of recycling at work here, as the author argues that the life of an object does not end when it is destroyed, and recreated artistically, but actually gains more expressive power.TAE moves beyond this nation’s past reliance upon revolutionary imagery, exemplified in the pristine, iconic form of the AK-47. TAE artists offer a new paradigm: the glorification of peace rather than war, as it is now symbolized through destroyed and transformed weapons. Rooted in the tension of their strong visual presence, TAE artworks maintain their original visceral potency and challenge viewers as weapons for killing are transformed into tools of reconciliation, peacebuilding, and healing. 

Dr. Matthew Lange

Moral systems are commonly focused on collective, or communal, well-being.  In this talk, Lange considers how such community-oriented morality commonly motivates and justifies violence against "others."  As a result, perpetrators of ethnic, nationalist, and religious violence commonly are not degenerate sociopaths but instead participate in violence out of a concern for their community.  The talk draws on a variety of cases ranging from American lynchings, the Nazi Genocide, and ethnic civil warfare in South Asia.   

• 10:00 – 11:00 am          Lecture: “The Myth of Religious Violence as Justification for Violence”
• 11:00 – 11:30 am          Question and Answer Session
• 11:30 – 11:50 am          Break
• 11:50 – 1:00 pm           Roundtable Discussion

• 2:00 – 3:00 pm             Lecture: “The Power of Art – How Mozambique’s Transforming Arms into Plowshares Project Transforms into Peace”
• 3:00 – 3:30 pm             Question and Answer Session
• 3:30 – 3:50 pm             Break
• 3:50 – 5:00 pm             Roundtable Discussion

9:00 am – 12:00 pm      Dr. Matthew Lange: “Community, Morality, and Violence”

• 9:00 – 10:00 am            Lecture: “Community, Morality, and Violence”
• 10:00 – 10:30 am          Question and Answer Session
• 10:30 – 10:50am           Break
• 10:50 am – 12:00 pm    Roundtable Discussion