The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise WoodwardWhat can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal system and the media contribute to a collective understanding of class, nation, race and gender? In this book, Siobhan Holohan explores media representations of law and order in the context of notions of multi-culturalism and victim-centred politics. Two high profile cases - the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the US trial of the British au-pair, Louise Woodward - are examined. Holohan argues that the stories built up around Woodward and Lawrence - the organization of public discourse around a sacrificial figure - have contributed to exclusionary patterns of social order. The book offers a perceptive account of what makes some criminal legal cases prone to scrutiny and spectacle and provides a vivid illustration of the presence of power relations in legal decisions. In conclusion, the author draws on the model of the Macpherson report to propose a more inclusive form of social and legal judgement that takes into account social inequalities. |
Contents
vii | 13 |
Symbolic Transformations | 36 |
The Scapegoat Mechanism | 58 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise ... Siobhan Holohan No preview available - 2017 |
The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise ... Siobhan Holohan No preview available - 2022 |
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