Theorist Research Homework

Stuart Hall:
-Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who mainly focuses on ideas of hegemony and cultural studies.
-He also looks at the way race is presented in the mass media which could relate to the London Riots as some news stations when showing the coverage could be seen to have been presenting one race as the dominant individuals committing the crimes.
-He believes 'moral panics' which the media created over the riots are created to gain public support and police the crisis which was seen during the riots as groups were seen banding together to try and help the forces.
-Hall's theory of encoding/decoding (1973) could relate to the riots as he believes the message the media gives is never transparent and the audience is not passive. As when people were watching the coverage, some people could be horrified yet others could think its right and join in.
-Hall has published many books but the ones that could perhaps relate to the riots are, 'Policing the crisis' (1978) as as said above this relates to the ideas of 'moral panics'. 'Law, class and control' (1981) as there was a lot in the news focused on the class and status of the rioters as it was portrayed as the lower classes and people on benefits.

Henry Tajfel:
-Henry Tajfel was a British social psychologist who focused on prejudice and social identity.
-His most famous theory was the Social Identity Theory:
Social Identity is described as 'social identity is a person's sense of who they are based on their groups memberships. Tajfel described this theory as the people in these groups e.g. football team have a sense of pride and self esteem and they feel they belong in the social world. He also said in order to increase our self image we boost our group and can discriminate and be prejudice against other groups to make our group look better. Then there is categorization where we are classed as 'us' and other groups are 'them'.
This relates to the London riots as the rioters themselves would perhaps have felt as sense of unity and one-ness as they were all banding together for what they thought were the right reasons, in terms of having to boost their self image the rioters were coming together to go against authority so in this situation the police and government were 'them' and the rioters were 'us'.
-Tajfel published a range of books, some relating to the London riots could be:
Journey of Social issues and Social categorization and intergroup behavior. These books could perhaps be related as they both look at the theory of social identity.

Caroline Howarth:
-Caroline Howarth is a Dr who lived in South Africa for her early life and began teaching there where she saw discrimination and terrible racism which shaped her views for the future.
-Howarth focuses mainly on race and two of her research projects were:
'Contesting representations of race in predominately white schools'- This revolved around Howarth working in a mainly white school and assessing how the looked at race, she looked at this through drawings and stories to see how the children portrayed race.
-Another project was 'Asserting identity in a stigmatized multicultural community' which was where she studied the relationship between identity, community and representation in Brixton. She worked within secondary schools in the area and studied how poverty and various factors affected them.
These projects could relate to the riots because race was a big thing in media coverage and there was a big focus on the communities where rioting was taking place and they were stereotyped as 'poverty stricken'.