Project summary
Understanding Offence: delimiting the (un)sayable
This Major Project considers ‘Offence’ as a phenomenon and the challenges for society in attempting to regulate offensive speech and behaviour.
The project will interrogate offence from multiple disciplinary perspectives to deepen comprehension of the phenomenon, and elucidate what is involved in giving and taking offence. It will examine the term’s conceptual slipperiness and the context-dependent nature of understandings of offence, and analyse the complexities inherent in attempting to formulate normative definitions of offence that can be applied in legal or other regulatory frameworks.
Term: Epiphany
Principal Investigators:
Professor Helen Fenwick (Durham Law School), [email protected]
Professor Patrick Zuk, School of Modern Languages and Cultures (Russian Studies), [email protected]