| Focusing on the question, "How do murders transform into community traumas," I address a counterintuitive process in which a personally traumatic event directly afflicting specific individuals transforms into a shared experience across indirectly involved members of a community. I argue that this process unfolds in three stages---labeling victims, creating shared loss, and commemorating victims. I analyze 128 murders in Bloomington, IN (1985-2012) and Indianapolis, IN (2006-2012). My data consist of demographic information, news reports, and archival materials. I conduct three types of analysis for each stage: cross-tabulations of causal conditions and outcomes, crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and in-depth qualitative case comparisons. In my first stage of analysis, I examine the configurations of conditions that are necessary for news media to recognize murdered victims as sympathetic and a loss to the broader community. For my second stage of analysis, I analyze the strategies advocates use to manipulate people indirectly tied to a murder victim to feel a sense of shared loss, collective identity, and social solidarity in response to the murder. In my third stage of analysis, I explore how commemorations solidify collective identity, transcend painful memories, and construct meaning from the senselessness and horror of murder. I examine two unstudied forms of commemoration---institutionalized commemorations of victims and mass commemorations of individual victims. The major findings of this dissertation center on complexities of sympathy principles and the ways the structural context of murders influence the publication of feature stories and the occurrence and forms of commemorations. By comparing a small town and a large city, I demonstrated that the location of a murder has a significant influence in the processes of featuring and commemorating victims. In general, findings point to the centrality of vicarious emotion and advocates' use of emotion management strategies as the mechanisms through which individuals and communities develop a sense of collective trauma, collective identity, and come together in commemorative and restorative social solidarity after a murder. |
