How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity?
In my talk, I argue that that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about its “cultural lives”. Punishment is a complex social institution which has an impact on, and draws from, elite and popular culture. In a comparative analysis of US and German “mentalities” and “sensibilities” (David Garland) towards capital punishment, I aim to show how social, institutional, and economic change since the beginning of the 20th century have interacted with cultural change and have influenced the life and death of the of the state’s ultimate sanction.
