Justifying torture in the public sphere: hypothetical scenarios, real consequences

This event was scheduled to take place on Thursday 8 November at 5pm. Due to rail cancellations, this has now been rescheduled for Friday 9 November 10am. The new location for this rescheduled event is Arts Building, School of International Relations – Seminar Room 8.

Lisa Stampnitzky is lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield, and completed her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism", was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Her current book project, titled, How Torture Became Speakable, is funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and will be published by Stanford University Press.

By the late twentieth century, opposition to torture was accepted as an almost universal principle. Yet after 9/11, the permissibility of torture suddenly burst onto the scene as an open question. This lecture analyses how justifications of torture entered the American public sphere via the mainstream media after 9/11/2001.

This is a public lecture organised by the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence. The lecture is presented by Dr Lisa Stampnitzky.