Dr. Sam Illingworth reads his poem Experience of Violence for ideaXme. Poem 1. Find the reading in video format here.
This collaboration is the first in a series of ideaXme collaborations with scientists, innovators and artists who move the human story forward. Dr. Sam Illingworth, PhD. Atmospheric Physics, is an Associate Professor in Academic Practice at Edinburgh University in the UK. His work and research focus on using poetry and games to develop dialogue between different audiences.
This poem is inspired by recent research, which has found that violence is broadly felt by millions of Californians.
Fuelled by gun violence, cities across the United States are breaking all-time homicide records. According to the 2020 Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, homicides rose 30% from 2019 to 2020, the largest single-year increase the agency has recorded since it began tracking these crimes in the 1960s. Previous studies of exposure to violence have tended to focus on events such as direct or witnessed abuse, and there is much evidence to suggest that these exposures can have long-lasting adverse effects on all parties and their extended networks and communities, particularly when firearms are involved.
In this new study, researchers decided to focus on a broader range of experiences of violence in daily life; for example, hearing gunshots, encountering a sidewalk memorial to a violent death, or learning about a violent event through a friend or family member. The researchers surveyed 2,870 adults from across California, asking them questions that related to their own experiences of violence, and in total 65% of the participants reported one or more such experience with 11% reporting three or more. Other trends included knowledge of people who had shot themselves being greatest amongst respondents aged 60 years or older, and the knowledge of persons being at risk of violence to themselves being greatest amongst people aged 18-29 years. Ultimately this research shows that in California the majority of people have at least one experience of violence and given that this is a state with relatively low rates of firearm violence, this situation is likely to be much worse in other regions across the United States.
Links to Dr. Illingworth’s audio podcast and social media:
https://thepoetryofscience.scienceblo… https://scipoetry.podbean.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samillingworth?re…
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consiliencej…
Research and further poem read: Research: Experiences of violence in daily life among adults in California: a population-representative survey, cited in the poem: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.c… Parable in Praise of Violence, also read by Dr. Illingworth by Tony Barnstone here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem…
Video credits, images added: A protestor at the 2018 March for Our Lives on De la Guerra Plaza and State Street in Santa Barbara, California (Image Credit: skolr via Wikimedia Commons). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi… Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals. One of many marches in the USA and abroad on March 24 to protest gun violence and commemorate the victims of the Parkland, Florida massacre. Image Credit: Bob Dass via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
