Academic/Journal Articles on Columbine

I have a bunch of articles on or related to Columbine that have been published in academic journals over the years. A lot of these are criminal justice related - for obvious reasons. Others look at it from a social science perspective - anthropology, sociology, psychology. As I get time, I'll be adding what I have to the folder you'll find at the link:

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If anyone has a specific article they want but can't access, I might be able to help. Just post it here or pm me and I'll see if it's available through my database access.

The first set of articles are part of a special issue from a criminal justice journal focused on the effects of Columbine. It was published to mark the 20th anniversary, so these are all current articles.

I also added an Article by Carolyn Lunsford Mears, who is the parent of one of the kids who was in the school - not being shot at - when everything was happening. She interviews other parents and talks about how people respond to trauma. The bulk of the interviews are in her dissertation, which I have somewhere and will add as soon as I find it.

Oh this is nice. Thanks for compiling all this, this is gonna be a worthwhile read.

Thanks, looks like good stuff!

You're welcome! I'll add some more stuff this coming weekend when I get more time to go through and organize.

Nice!

Adding to the list-
here is one on the student "code of silence" and how breaking this code by encouraging kids to come forward if they suspect another student is planning something is important. Scroll down a bit on the page to see the paper.

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thelmar wrote:

Adding to the list-
here is one on the student "code of silence" and how breaking this code by encouraging kids to come forward if they suspect another student is planning something is important. Scroll down a bit on the page to see the paper.

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Nice one! Thanks for adding that here.

There are two more in the folder linked in the first post now, both by Ralph Larkin:

2009 - The Columbine Legacy: Rampage Shootings as Political Acts
Abstract:
The  purpose  of  this  article  is  to  explore  how  the  Columbine  shootings  on April  20, 1999,  influenced  subsequent  school  rampage  shootings.  First,  school  rampage  shoot-ings  are  defined  to  distinguish  them  from  other  forms  of  school  violence.  Second, post-Columbine shootings and thwarted shootings are examined to determine how they were  influenced  by  Columbine.  Unlike  prior  rampage  shooters,  Harris  and  Klebold committed their rampage shooting as an overtly political act in the name of oppressed students  victimized  by  their  peers.  Numerous  post-Columbine  rampage  shooters referred  directly  to  Columbine  as  their  inspiration;  others  attempted  to  supersede  the Columbine shootings in body count. In the wake of Columbine, conspiracies to blow up schools and kill their inhabitants by outcast students were uncovered by authorities. School rampage shootings, most of which referred back to Columbine as their inspira-tion,  expanded  beyond  North  America  to  Europe,  Australia,  and  Argentina;  they increased on college campuses and spread to nonschool venues. The Columbine shoot-ings redefined such acts not merely as revenge but as a means of protest of bullying, intimidation, social isolation, and public rituals of humiliation.

2009 - Legitimated Adolescent Violence: Lessons from Columbine - a book chapter from School Shootings: International Reseach, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention
Abstract:
On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris perpetrated the largest rampage shooting in history of American education. The shootings initiated a debate about the causes. Sociological research indicates that the shootings were the consequence of predatory violence by student elites. Such violence is often visited upon outcast student groups who reject the values or worldview of the dominant elite. Viewed by the dominant majority as occupying a degraded moral position, their harassment and intimidation by elite students tends to be legitimated in the hegemonic ideology of the school. A detailed analysis of the Columbine shootings indicates that the massacre represented the culmination of conflict between elite and outcast students. Adolescent bullying and violence is often defined out of existence because it is perpetrated by student elites organized around sports exploits, especially football. Such violence is dangerous because it establishes a norm in which predatory behavior is acceptable, especially when visited upon those who are different, weak, and vulnerable. Many school rampage shootings before Columbine were vengeance for bullying and humiliation; nearly all post-Columbine school rampage shootings and thwarted plots were retaliations by outcast students for the predatory violence visited upon them by their higher-status peers.

I wish there was some index with all the articles about the case. Have you ever come across one questioning the timeline or the "plan B" narrative? Those would be most interesting to me, though most aren't about the massacre itself in that way, rather about before or after (psychology, law, etc)

The standard ones easy to find are "Rampage Shootings as Political Acts" and Jerald Block's "Lessons from Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage". The latter focuses on video games, and has some interesting ideas that you won't find elsewhere, though I can't say I believe them, such as that the library was chosen because it had the computers and it was a unabomber-style revolt against technology.

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I have a ton of stuff I have not had a good look at yet, but I’ll see if I might have something like that. This weekend - possibly later tonight if time allows - I’m planning to add a bunch more that I’ve gone through during the week. Once those are up, though, I can search around for something dealing with the plan b notion. This would be an excellent topic and I do hope someone has covered it competently.

Either way, I’ll let you know what I do - or don’t - find!

And thank you for noting those articles. For everyone’s convenience and in the interest of making the folder as complete a repository as possible - I’ll add them in this weekend as well. Maybe with a little more work this can become the index you’re looking for. That is basically my goal in amazing it all for everyone Glad people are finding it helpful!

Just added 8 more articles. I'm doing this by year, for now, to make it a little easier to organize and upload in some kind of coherent order. Today we have:

1999
Burns, Gary. "Marilyn Manson and the Apt Pupils of Littleton." Popular Music and Society. 23(3): 3-8.
A critique of press coverage of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In opposition to press accounts that focused on rock singer Marilyn Manson as a possible cultural influence upon murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the role of the dominant right-wing media culture in the U.S. is examined.

Plasketes, George. “Things to do in Littleton When You’re Dead: A Post-Columbine Collage.” Popular Music & Society. 23(3): 9-24
Looks at the media coverage of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. Appeal of the Columbine shootings to media consumers; Changes in the media landscape for information and entertainment; Coverage of the event by Katie Couric of the `Today Show'; Actions taken by `Entertainment Tonight' on the issue; Importance of media literacy.

2000
Arman, John F. “In the Wake of Tragedy at Columbine High School.” Professional School Counseling 3(3) 218-220.
Offers a retrospective look into the insight of people who were close to the Columbine tragedy and discusses what interventions have since been instituted at Columbine High School. Writes that school counselors have had to reconceptualize their comprehensive developmental guidance and counseling programs to include the mental health needs of students in the 1990s.

Martinson, David L. “A School Responds to Controversial Student Speech: Serious Questions in Light of Columbine.” Clearing House 73 (3): 145
Presents arguments to support the issues of difficulty to defend freedom of student speech/expression in the light of an incident that took place at a Florida high school a year prior to the Columbine shootings in Colorado in April 1999. Details on the arrest of nine students in Dade County in Miami, Florida for creating an underground pamphlet containing racial slurs, sexist remarks and profanities; Basic premises of Thomas Emerson's First Amendment.

Nelson, G Lynn. “Warriors With Words: Toward a Post-Columbine Writing Curriculum.” The English Journal 89(5) 42-46
Argues that teachers of writing can readily become forces for peace in our schools and, by extension, in society at large. Argues that returning to personal story at the center of the writing curriculum, accompanied by deep listening, will promote peace and well-being, voice and sense of self, and respect and caring as well as powerful literacy in English classrooms.

2003
Addington, Lynn. “Students’ Fear After Columbine: Findings from a Randomized Experiment.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 19(4) 367-387
On April 20, 1999, the most deadly act of school violence in the United States occurred at Columbine High School. Public perceptions and media accounts suggested that fear of victimization at school greatly increased after Columbine. The actual response is unknown. The 1999 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey provides a unique opportunity to study Columbine’s effect on students’ fear. Experimental conditions were approximated by the NCVS sampling design that randomly allocated the 12- to 18-year-old student-respondents to pre- and post-April 20 groups. Contrary to expectations, students were only slightly more fearful after Columbine. An initial explanation for this finding is explored. As little is known about fear following highly publicized incidents of extreme violence such as Columbine and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this research provides an essential foundation for further study and theoretical development in this largely-ignored area of fear.

Ordonez-Jasis, Rosario and Pablo Jasis. “Bowling for Columbine: Critically Interrogating the Industry of Fear.” Social Justice 30(3) 127-133
Review of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, a disturbing story about the fabrication and perpetuation of fear in society, especially in the United States. The essay examines how a multilevel campaign of fear works to legitimize symbolic and material violence at the national and international levels. It also addresses the social implications of this violence. The authors explore the possibility of articulating an oppositional pedagogy of peace as an alternative to the discourse of war, criminalization, and social alienation.

Stancato, Frank A. “The Columbine Tragedy: Adolescent Identity and Future Recommendations.” The Clearing House 77(1) 19-22
The April 1999 Columbine High School tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, should cause teachers to realize that public school education goes beyond the learning of academic subject matter Student identity and concept of self are also vital components of education.

adastra wrote:

Plasketes, George. “Things to do in Littleton When You’re Dead: A Post-Columbine Collage.”

Yikes! Harsh title!

These all look really interesting. I guess I won't be getting many of my planned chores accomplished tomorrow!

This isn't an academic paper so hopefully it doesn't derail your thread, but I got a Google alert about it and learned some things reading it. The Secret Service recently released "Protecting America's Schools: A US Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence"
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thelmar wrote:

adastra wrote:

Plasketes, George. “Things to do in Littleton When You’re Dead: A Post-Columbine Collage.”

Yikes! Harsh title!

These all look really interesting. I guess I won't be getting many of my planned chores accomplished tomorrow!

This isn't an academic paper so hopefully it doesn't derail your thread, but I got a Google alert about it and learned some things reading it. The Secret Service recently released "Protecting America's Schools: A US Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence"
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Yeah, it's definitely the most "interesting" title I've seen yet!

Thanks for linking that doc - it can totally fit in here!

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have another batch ready to post. It's been a shitty week for being occupied with stuff that needs to be done asap.

I'm also going to start putting together what I hope can be a master bibliography with abstracts of all the articles. That way, people can even look at that and find what they might be interested in, then access it in the folder. Big job, but it might be helpful to people interested in researching this.

adastra wrote:

I'm also going to start putting together what I hope can be a master bibliography with abstracts of all the articles. That way, people can even look at that and find what they might be interested in, then access it in the folder. Big job, but it might be helpful to people interested in researching this.

That would definitely be helpful, thanks for doing this!

Ok, here's a few more. Not as many as last week - I'm screwed for much time the next few weeks, but it's something. Listed by year again. Get 'em here:

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1999
“Editorial: Values: Will Columbine High Teach Us Anything?” 1999. The North American Review 284 (3/4): 1.
THE MEDIA SEEM TO BELIEVE that if we crucify Marilyn Manson and do away with bloody-imaged computer games, the young will become non-violent. The educationists seem to believe that if we teach anger management and "profile" the potentially unruly adolescent, future Littletons (or Paducahs, or_[write your school in here]) will not take place. The politicians seem to believe that metal detectors, beefed-up security, and stronger juvenile-crime laws will triumph over deadly schoolroom rebellion. The traditionalist liberals seem to believe that if we have genuine gun control and jail terms for parents who are careless gun owners, all will be well.

2000
Mary Anne Raywid, and Libby Oshiyama. 2000. “Musings in the Wake of Columbine: What Can Schools Do?” The Phi Delta Kappan 81 (6): 444.
THERE HAVE BEEN multiple attempts to figure out the reasons for the Columbine High School tragedy. The availability of guns has been widely blamed, as has the violence depicted in films and videos. Some analysts have turned their sights on parental failure. Others have looked to deep-seated personality problems within the young assassins, while still others have focused on the seductive power of hate groups. There is probably some truth in most of these explanations, plus others, with the choice among them being largely a matter of individual perspective.

2002
Brener, Nancy D, Thomas R Simon, Mark Anderson, Lisa C Barrios, and Meg L Small. 2002. “Effect of the Incident at Columbine on Students’ Violence- and Suicide-Related Behaviors.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 22 (3): 146–50. doi:10.1016/S0749-3797(01)00433-0
Background: This study examined the impact that the violent incident at Columbine High School may have had on reports of behaviors related to violence and suicide among U.S. high school students. Methods: Nationally representative data from the 1999 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) were analyzed using logistic regression analyses. Results: Students who completed the 1999 YRBS after the Columbine incident were more likely to report feeling too unsafe to go to school and less likely to report considering or planning suicide than were students who completed the 1999 YRBS before the incident. Conclusions: These results highlight how an extreme incident of school violence can affect students nationwide.

2003
Fast, JD. 2003. “After Columbine: How People Mourn Sudden Death.” SOCIAL WORK 48 (4): 484–91.
Responses to the rampage killings at Columbine High School were analyzed at the national level, the level of the community, and that of the family. In many cases people responded by undertaking "grief projects" involving manipulation of symbols, either in the creation of artwork, the decoration of existing structures, on internet websites, and in the raising (and occasional destruction) of memorial objects. Many of these projects were undertaken together to create a community of bereavement. It is suggested that these projects are best understood within the context of Worden's task model of mourning (Worden, 1991), particularly task three, "Adjusting to an environment in which the deceased is missing." The differences between mourning sudden death and anticipated death are also explored.

Ogle, J.P., M. Eckman, and C.A. Leslie. 2003. “Appearance Cues and the Shootings at Columbine High: Construction of a Social Problem in the Print Media.” Sociological Inquiry 73 (1): 1–27. doi:10.1111/1475-682x.00039.
Employs an interpretive approach and the social constructionist theory of social problems to examine newspaper representations of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. Both primary and secondary claims-makers staged claims and counterclaims contributing to the construction of Columbine as an appearance-linked social problem, that is, the gunmen's mode of dress and appearance was seen as providing evidence about their motivations for the killings. The content and form of these claims varied according to the stage in the construction of the problem. Further, although both primary and secondary claims were made with respect to the conceptualization of the problem, an explanation for it, and solutions to it, the roles of primary and secondary claims-makers in constructing the problem varied. Implications of claims made in the media and related to the role of appearance in the shootings are considered.


2011
Hong, Jun Sung, Hyunkag Cho, Paula Allen-Meares, and Dorothy L. Espelage. 2011. “The Social Ecology of the Columbine High School Shootings.” Children and Youth Services Review 33 (6): 861–68. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.12.005.
The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 prompted school officials and policy-makers to create and implement programs and policies that would prevent violence in school and ensure school safety. Ten years have passed since the Columbine shooting; however, debates concerning risk factors for the shootings continue to ensue. The focus of this article is to examine the Columbine school shootings within the context of Bronfenbrenner's (1994) ecological systems analysis. We examine the most commonly identified risk factors, which operate within five systems levels: chrono-, macro-, exo-, meso-, and microsystems, and draw implications for school-based practice and policy.

More coming as soon as I get 5 minutes free from either holidays or coursework to do something interesting and enjoyable... Sorry about the huge delay!

adastra wrote:

More coming as soon as I get 5 minutes free from either holidays or coursework to do something interesting and enjoyable... Sorry about the huge delay!

No worries. There's so much here I am not even halfway through with what you've posted yet. Enjoy your holidays, finish up with school and start on it again in the new year.

Adding to your list! An article i came across awhile back.

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novaprospekt wrote:

Adding to your list! An article i came across awhile back.

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Thanks for the contribution!

I am finally off for a bit and after a little travel this week I have a bunch more articles to go through and post. Also trying to work on the list of articles with abstracts so people can easily look for and download what they're interested in. The first iteration of it will probably be ready with the next batch of articles. It won't be comprehensive to start with - as things get posted I'll add them in - but it will be a start and hopefully, this will be useful to people doing their own research and/or looking to see what other people have written about Columbine so far.

If there were some way to make this into a searchable database, I'd love to know. It's great to organize everything into a nice one-stop downloadable folder thing, but it'd probably be even nicer if this was all organized library-database style. When it comes to coding/website stuff, I have no clue. Though maybe I can figure something out at some point.

Here are a few more - lots to go still. There is one here that seemed particularly interesting from a pop culture perspective about school shootings appearing in young adult literature and related media, and looks at how it's handled there: "From ‘‘I Don’t Like Mondays’’ to ‘‘Pumped Up Kicks’’: Rampage School Shootings in Young Adult Fiction and Young Adult Lives

All of them here, as usual: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

2009
Addington, Lynn. “Cops and Cameras Public School Security as a Policy Response to Columbine.” AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST. 52(10). 1426-1446 DOI: 10.1177/0002764209332556
After the shootings at Columbine High School, many public schools increased their visible security measures, such as use of security cameras and guards. This study assesses this policy response. Particular attention is given to the fear that prompted changes in school security, the types of visible security measures adopted by schools after Columbine, and the positive and negative consequences of these measures. Synthesizing the relevant literature highlights the lack of evaluative work regarding the effectiveness of school security and how little is known about the impact of security measures on students' civil liberty and privacy interests. Gaining a better understanding of school security can help officials make more informed decisions in response to rare, but highly publicized, violent crimes such as Columbine.

Birkland, TA et al. “Media Framing and Policy Change After Columbine” AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST Volume: 52 Issue: 10 Pages: 1405-1425 DOI: 10.1177/0002764209332555
The 1999 Columbine school shooting incident in Colorado gained far more media attention across a broader range of issues than any school violence episode before or since. One might expect that Columbine would have had an influence on public opinion, public policy, and scholarship commensurate with the attention it gained. We find that the event did contribute in a limited but interesting way to scholarship on media framing. But the effect of Columbine on public opinion and the nature and substance of public policy was limited. Attention to school shootings peaked with Columbine, and the attention surrounding that event mostly spurred more rapid implementation of existing policies and tools that were already available to schools. In this article, the authors review first the media and public opinion research generated by Columbine; they then review the public policy research referencing Columbine and evaluate the "lessons" scholars have drawn from that event.

2011
Hong, Jun Sung, Hyunkag Cho, Paula Allen-Meares, and Dorothy L. Espelage. 2011. “The Social Ecology of the Columbine High School Shootings.” Children and Youth Services Review 33 (6): 861–68. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.12.005.
The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 prompted school officials and policy-makers to create and implement programs and policies that would prevent violence in school and ensure school safety. Ten years have passed since the Columbine shooting; however, debates concerning risk factors for the shootings continue to ensue. The focus of this article is to examine the Columbine school shootings within the context of Bronfenbrenner's (1994) ecological systems analysis. We examine the most commonly identified risk factors, which operate within five systems levels: chrono-, macro-, exo-, meso-, and microsystems, and draw implications for school-based practice and policy.


2018
Ash, Gwynne Ellen, and Jane M. Saunders. 2018. “From ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ to ‘Pumped Up Kicks’: Rampage School Shootings in Young Adult Fiction and Young Adult Lives.” Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly 49 (1): 34–46.
This essay considers 12 books of contemporary young adult fiction, published in the United States between 2000 and 2016, with plots directly related to rampage school shootings. It compares the shooters’ psychological types, ages, races, genders, roles, motives and the narrative points of view in the books with dominant cultural scripts for rampage school shootings and explains how the fictional texts confirm, critique, or extend these scripts.

Happy New Years Eve! Here's a bunch more articles - and a book chapter or two.

Still messing around with putting a full list up on a site. My accordion menu skills need work, but it's getting there.

A little bit of an aside/rant: there are a lot of glaring factual errors in way too many of these articles. Things a 30-second google search would correct. Things you should know if you've done your research. At some point, someone (nagging myself here) needs to write something about shoddy academic research on Columbine contributing to and perpetuation errors and misconceptions about the massacre, perpetrators, and victims. Rita Gleason's recent book was a great start. It's terrible because at least a few of the articles with crap info make some good points about the shooting, reactions to it, what it means culturally/socially. But then the errors ut me off and make me question the validity of claims made using incorrect information - rumors, made u media panic bullshit, etc. I want a well-written, thoughtful, insightful, relatable, factually accurate thing to read that tells me whoever wrote this did their research and genuinely cares about the subject. Not someone fulfilling their article quota for a shot at tenure.

Take the book chapter, "Disposable Youth." There are good ideas in there about alienation, the impossibility of imagining a future, how disposable people in the workplace became and how the sense of and fear of being easily replaced worked within Eric and Dylan's parent's generation to change the family dynamic across America. What did that mean for forming identity and feeling secure for them? There's a great discussion about "the monsters next door," and the process of how and why Harris and Klebold were marked out by media as monstrous. People, regular people, don't commit horrible acts, so the perpetrators were obviously monsters and not, in fact, high school students. Admitting Eric and Dylan's relative mundaneness might mean we can't recognize who is or is not 'bad.' Yet, Stein insists on using 'Trenchcoat Warriors' as a weird replacement for and characterization of not just Trenchcoat Mafia, but similar kids across the country. Why? Then, the other chapter from Castelli doesn't question the "she said yes" narrative. Maybe that wasn't her purpose, but talking about how that was misattributed to Cassie yet took off nonetheless might add a bit more depth to her claims.

Anyways, still interesting reading and worth checking these out. Like I said, there are good thoughts in here, even if several need a fact check.

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2000
Marshall, Elliot and Michael Hagmann. “The Shots Heard ‘Round the World.” Science. 28 July, 2000. 298, 5479. Pp 570.
The massacre at Columbine High School unleashed a torrent of fresh concern over the threat that violence poses to society. It also energized a government research effort to understand and prevent violence.


2002
Paff Ogle, Jennifer and Molly Eckman. “Dress-Related Responses to the Columbine Shootings: Other and Self-Designed.” Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2, December 2002 155-194
DOI: 10.1177/107772702237933
In 1999, two students at Columbine High School (CHS) used gunfire to claim their lives and those of 13 others. Media writers devoted considerable attention to this crime, drawing linkages between the shootings and dress. The purpose of this study was to explore this media dialogue, particularly the dress-related responses proposed and/or adopted in reaction to the shootings, who advanced/opposed these responses, and why. Theories of identity, social power, and symbolic interaction guided the authors’ work. An inductive content analysis approach was used to examine dress-related text published in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News concerning the shootings. Analyses revealed two major dress-related responses: (a) other imposed regulation aimed at protecting students and deterring them from expressing hatred against others and (b) self-designed/selected creative acts of resistance for grieving, memorializing, and unifying. Arguments in support of and against these responses are discussed, and theoretical implications are considered.


2003
Consalvo, Mia. “The Monsters Next Door: Media Constructions of Boys and Masculinity.” Feminist Media Studies. 3(1) pp 27-45.
Discusses media construction of violent forms of white, masculine subjectivity. Studying how men are constructed in crime news is important, because when news reports explore the “factors” that led Klebold and Harris to their actions, for example, this coverage is constructing for audiences the elements considered relevant to the crime, and through omission, those that are irrelevant. Inattention by media researchers is especially evident concerning news representations of white men. The following questions were asked: What were the central themes about the killings that the media outlets
emphasized? How were the killers and The Trench Coat Mafia portrayed in terms of their interests and their social position within the high school? Was race an issue in the coverage? If so, how? Was masculinity an issue in the coverage? If so, how?

Castelli, Elizabeth. “Religion as a Chain of Memory: Cassie Bernall of Columbine High and the American Legacy of Early Christian Martyrdom” In Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Book chapter exploring how the reported martyrdom of Cassie Bernall during the Columbine mass shooting is related to martyr myths from early Christianity. Many people interpreted the events in Littleton in light of a wide range of political, social, and cultural concerns from gun control to
popular music, from religion in the public schools to adolescent social cruelty. Moreover, almost immediately, out of this stark act of calculated violence and mass killing emerged narratives of Christian martyrdom. Through narrative retelling, the monstrous took on meaning. When Christians were the victims of persecution, torture, and execution in the Roman period, they suffered primarily at the hands
of imperial authorities and in a context in which they were a distinct social, political, and religious minority—perceived to be or rhetorically constructed as dangerous cultural outsiders, xenoi, barbaroi. The two students who came to be identified as martyrs at Columbine High School, meanwhile, were part of the mainstream of their society. Their killers were not representatives of state authority but were rather their disaffected and deeply alienated peers. In the Columbine case, the killers—not the
Christians—were repeatedly identified as dangerous cultural outsiders.

Forman, Murray. 2004. “Freaks, Aliens, and the Social Other: Representations of Student Stratification in U.S. Television’s First Post-Columbine Season.” Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film & Television, no. 53 (Spring): 66–82. doi:10.1353/vlt.2004.0005.
Discusses the television season influence of the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Introduction of television programs that capitalized on the core issues of the Columbine incident; Primary elements within the high school teen television genre; Analysis of the alienation, marginality and social hierarchies of difference portrayed in high school teen programs.

Socolvsky, Maya. “Cyber-Spaces of Grief: Online Memorials and the Columbine High School Shootings.”
JAC. Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue, Part 1: Trauma and Rhetoric (2004), pp. 467-489
Discusses the psychological and sociopolitical roles of online memorials. Socolvsky states that “Death is narrated fully, and although the departed are mourned and missed, death itself is understood and mastered [on an Internet memorial]” (476). Looks at web memorials for several victims of Columbine, including Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott, and explores what these memorials say about them, and about the processing of grief in cyber-spaces versus physical space.

Stein, Howard F. “Disposable Youth: The 1999 Columbine High School Massacre as American Metaphor.” (book chapter) In: Beneath the Crust of Culture : Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Cultural Unconscious in American Life. Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers.
This chapter attempts to address the questions: What does it mean to approach the April 20, 1999, massacre at Columbine High School as a cultural event? And what are the unconscious determinants, meanings, and ramifications of this event? I thus set for myself three inter-related tasks in this chapter: (1) an understanding of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999; (2) an understanding of physical violence (knives, guns, bombs) by adolescents in America; and (3) an understanding of the psychodynamics of American culture of which (1) and (2) are at once symptom and metaphor. I shall argue that the slaughter of youth by youth at that Colorado school is in part an extension of the rage against the imminent disposability felt by tens of millions of Americans in an increasingly corporate-dominated culture. In the process, I hope to illumine such behavioral science conundrums as: understanding human aggression, understanding contemporary “violence in the workplace” (a widespread social problem and category, see Allcorn, 1994), and understanding the relationship between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders (Hilberg, 1992)—a relationship that constitutes a single overarching culture. This chapter will explore the very nature of psychodynamically informed cultural explanation for a catastrophe that has been exposed to universal gaze and interpretation by satellite-facilitated television. Specifically, how does one conceptually link large cultural processes (indeed, species-specific human biology) with local events? Specifically, how do social processes, structures, values, and change in the wider culture contribute to the triggering and later construction of such events as the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre? Further, how do cultures (people in groups) explain “themselves” to “themselves?”

2005
Clabaugh, Gary K., and Alison A. Clabaugh. "Bad Apples or Sour Pickles? Fundamental Attribution Error and the Columbine Massacre." Educational Horizons 83, no. 2 (2005): 81-86.
A painstaking investigative report by the Washington Post describes pre-massacre Columbine as filled with social vinegar. The high school was dominated by a "cult of the athlete." In this distorted environment, a coterie of favored jocks, who wore white hats to set themselves apart, consistently bullied, hazed, and sexually harassed their classmates while receiving preferential treatment from school authorities. Other students hated the abuses of the "steroid poster boys" but could do little. A former student testified, "Pretty much everyone was scared to take them on; if you said anything, they'd come after you, too." No matter how seductive they might seem, it is generally unwise to trust bad-apple explanations of school violence. Harris and Klebold's marginalization and subsequent maltreatment were major factors in the massacre. Their powerlessness in the face of this favored clique's illegitimate authority, psychological abuse, physical intimidation, and sexual harassment sparked a profound desire for revenge. As one student told a Post reporter, "They just let the jocks get to them. I think they were taunted to their limits." The primary task of educators charged with containing school violence is that they must discover and modify these causal networks. Years ago a pioneer social psychologist, Solomon Asch, incisively observed, "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function." Nevertheless, that is precisely the blunder the FBI fell into.

2016
Evans, Richard T. ““Faggots, Fame and Firepower”: Teenage Masculinity, School Shootings, and the Pursuit of Fame.” Canadian Review of American Studies / Revue canadienne d’études américaines 46, no. 1, 2016. doi:10.3138/cras.2014.018
This study of novels, films, and music dating from the late 1970s to the new millennium examine fictional and pop-culture presentations of school shootings, including the 1999 Columbine Massacre. The article also investigates notions of masculinity, normative heterosexuality, fame/infamy, homophobia, and violence within American culture. The fragility and uncertainty of proper masculine self-expression are unpacked and reimagined across a variety of texts, demonstrating how various authors have negotiated with the notions of teenage masculinity, belonging, isolation, and rage.

Here's another bundle of articles. A couple deal with the memorial crosses that went up, and how people reacted to Eric and Dylan being represented among the victims. Then there's a couple that explore the myth of the juvenile superpredator in Columbine discourse. And, some about how the shootings were interpreted among evangelicals and what that says about perceptions of "different" teens.

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I have a few that might be worth posting in a separate thread since they're a little different than your standard academic articles on Columbine in that they look sympathetically at Columbine fan culture/fan fiction. Very good reads, too. There's also one that does talk about Columbine and the role music for Harris and Klebold, but it mostly focuses on Pekka-Eric Auvinen and the videos he made, his internet persona. I don't see a Jokela subforum so I might just put this here - unless there's a Jokela thread I somehow missed that it can go in.

1999
Springhall, John. “Violent Media, Guns, and Moral Panics: The Columbine High School Massacre, 20 April 1999.” Pedagogical historica. Vol 35(3). P 621-EOA.
This essay attempts to place the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on 20 April 1999, and the initial media response, in some kind of historical perspective. In attempting to interpret what happened, a hierarchy of causation (presuppositions, preconditions, precipitants, and triggers) is adopted. Moral panic assumptions that media violence or the availability of guns are the immediate causes of shootings in middle-class, white American suburbs are questioned. The institutionalization of adolescence in American high schools is proposed as a more direct precipitant, while new evidence suggests that the trigger for the Littleton shootings should be located in harassment of outcast students (“the Trenchcoat Mafia”) by athletes and its effects on two psychologically disturbed students, killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

2007
Grider, Sylvia. “Public grief and the politics of memorial: Contesting the memory of ‘the shooters’ at Columbine High School.” Anthropology Today. Vol 23(3). p 2-7.
The literature on spontaneous shrines is extensive, but only recently have analytical and comparative articles begun to appear. As the editorial by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero in this issue argues, ‘[w]e need anthropology today [...] in the interest of developing a truly dynamic public anthropology, we challenge our colleagues to help make sense of these events as they occur ’ (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007: 2). In response to this challenge, the following article is a case study of one atypical shrine which developed following the shootings at Columbine High School (20 April 1999) and the controversy that particular shrine created. The more recent massacres at the Amish school in Pennsylvania (in October 2006) and Virginia Tech University (April 2007) will also be discussed briefly.

Muschert, Glenn. “The Columbine Victims and the Myth of the Juvenile Superpredator.” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. Vol 5(4) 351-366
This study examines the news media coverage of the 1999 Columbine school shootings, as a component of a noted crime myth of the juvenile superpredator. Thematic content analysis was conducted on 683 articles selected from print and broadcast media, revealing four themes of coverage, including the identification and description of the victims, details of victims’ deaths, coverage of memorial services, and other special social issues such as race, religion, and gun control. Chronological analysis of article distribution revealed four spikes in the volume of coverage, which is associated with media reframing of the victim's coverage to maintain the salience of the story. The Columbine victim coverage reaffirms the crime myth of the juvenile superpredator and reifies the punitive juvenile justice solutions suggested in alarmist responses to erroneous fears about growing rates and severity of youth violence. The impact of the superpredator myth on public discourse about Columbine and similar cases is explored

Strauss, Claudia. “Blaming for Columbine: Conceptions of Agency in the Cotemporary United States.” Current Anthropology. Vol 48(6). P 807-832.
Modern American ideas about personhood include the idea of agency – that every person can freely determine their action – as a strong component. In the wake of Columbine, however, blame for the actions of perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was placed on violent media like video games, movies, and music, the ease of acquiring guns, bad parenting, lack of religion in public schools, and bullying. Rarely if ever, was blame placed squarely on the killers as people. How can we understand this in light of American notions of personal responsibility and freedom of choice? What other forms of agency might there be in practice rather than in the abstract? Looking at Columbine, this article explores instances when personal agency might not explain the actions undertaken.

2009
Fryer, Benjamin. “The Media Spectacle of Columbine: Alienated Youth as an Object of Fear.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 52(10) 1387-1404.
Although youth violence and “delinquency” have frequently generated fear of alienated youth in American life, especially since the 1950s, the media coverage of the Columbine shootings reconstructed youth alienation in novel ways, generating a new fear and reality of “alien” youth. Analysis of both print and television media shows that following Columbine, school shooters have come to stand for an entire constellation of threats and troubles now ostensibly emanating from the very lifeworlds of formerly harmless White suburban youth. These lifeworlds have been typically framed in terms of alienation: as new forms of adolescent estrangement from parents, schools, and the major institutions and dominant culture of American life.

Pike, Sarah. “Dark Teens and Born-again Martyrs: Captivity Narratives after Columbine.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Vol 77(3) 647-679
This article explores the two streams of discourse that emerged around Columbine and continue in conversations about subsequent school shootings: Protestant evangelical captivity narratives dating back to the colonial period and discourse about troubled youth originating in the 19th century. Tales about threatening youth convey the extent to which young people do important work for their cultures, especially when they are used to shore up the bounds of normality against the threat of deviance. After Columbine, tales of adolescents captured by darkness contributed to a growing evangelical youth movement, effected legislation concerning the separation of church and state, impacted public school dress codes and behavior policies, and in general shaped Americans’ thinking about teenage deviance and normality.

2011
Girder, Sylvia. “Memorializing Shooters with Their Victims: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University.” In Margry, Peter Jan, Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina, and Carretero, eds. 2011. Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
A book chapter that looks at what it means when shooters are memorialized alongside their victims. Taking Columbine, Virginia Tech, and NIU as case studies, this chapter asks why these memorials were created, how they were interpreted, and what it means to memorialize shooters in the same space as their victims.

I just wanted to add this one, before I forget that I have this. It's the text of a presentation given last year on Columbine fan fiction that does not take a derisive tone. The person who presented this is quite decent for thinking about not jus Columbine, but mass violence. She has some good thoughts that contrast with a lot of the stuff academic write - and she has a more personable, personal one than many do, too, which makes it more readable. The pdf includes her web address.

There are more that need to be added, just been a bit overwhelmed lately.

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2019
Anderson, Alyssa. "Reimagining the Unimaginable: Fan Fiction of School Shooters." Presentation/Dissertation Chapter.
On April 20th, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold opened fire on Columbine High School, killing 13 before turning the gun on themselves.  Perhaps the most well-known school shooting in US history, the age of assailants—along with the middle-class, whitewashed location of Littleton, Colorado—ensured that Columbine launched a national conversation on youth and violence that continues through the present day. With each new shooting, politicians and organizers alike renew the battle over who or what exactly is to blame. Was it their music? Violent video games? Or were they simply disturbed individuals with far too easy access to firearms?

This paper offers a different take on the idea of dissent, one in which critical engagement with popular understanding yields truths that are less democratizing than they are unsettling. How exactly do we understand school shooters?

The nation’s obsession with Columbine was marked by a flood of cultural production. From tell-all books to true crime novels, to fiction “inspired by real events,” each artifact played with the idea of the motivation and consequence. While every reinterpretation of the attack stretches the boundaries of our understanding, one in particular throws them into sharp relief—fan-fiction. Digital platforms such as Tumblr and LiveJournal host communities of self-proclaimed “Columbiners” who, while mainly teenagers themselves, recycle the major characters and events of the attack into gifs and short stories. However, unlike popular media, Columbiners are sympathetic to plight of Harris and Klebold, whom they portray as likeable, courageous, and misunderstood. In this version, the gunmen are re-centered to be the heroes of their own story.

Here's another bunch I've finally organized. Note to anyone looking to publish academically about Columbine - apparently, American Behavioral Scientist publishes a decent amount of articles that deal with the shooting from a more social science perspective.

The Twemlow article is more like a book review, and he talks about Cullen's book a lot, but also Langman and Kass. Somewhere, I have another article like this written by a journalist, who really tears into Cullen for the misinformation he included. It's a fun read - I'll see if I can find that one next time.

2007
Pittaro, Michael. "School Violence and Social Control Theory: An Evaluation of the Columbine Massacre” International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. Vol 2 (1) pp1-12.
This paper will provide a brief analysis of past, present, and emerging research in reference to school violence, particularly in relation to school shootings, from the criminological perspective of Hirschi’s (1969) Social Control Theory. Prior to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and the most recent Virginia Tech rampage, research probing the etiology of school violence was virtually nonexistent. After Columbine, the nation frantically searched for answers as to how to intervene and prevent such a heinous atrocity from reoccurring in the future. This paper will not discuss the shooting
incident at Virginia Tech University (April, 16, 2007) due to the fact that the shootings took place on a college campus, which do not share many of the same characteristics as the typical high school campus environment.

2009
Aelthide, David. "The Columbine Shootings and the Discourse of Fear." American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 52(10). Pp 1354-1370.
The tragic events on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, provide an opportunity to reflect on the nature and consequences of not just the shootings but also the meanings that were ascribed to various facets of those events, including an emergent definition of the “Columbine Syndrome.” Based on a qualitative media analysis, this article examines part of the public presentations and news accounts of the “meanings of Columbine,” with particular emphasis on violence, crime, youth, popular culture, surveillance, social control, and terrorism. Analysis suggests that Columbine was merged with terrorism as part of the broader frame of fear and national security.

Giroux, Henry. “Ten Years After Columbine: The Tragedy of Youth Deepens.” Policy Futures in Education, Vol 7(3), 356–361.
For young people it just gets worse. Ten years after the Columbine tragedy, the debate over school
safety has clearly shown that educators, parents, politicians, and the mainstream media have created the conditions in which young people have increasingly become the victims of adult mistreatment, indifference, neglect, even violence. The tragic shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 seem to fix in time and space an image of children as violent, a threat to public safety, and increasingly in need of surveillance, policing, and containment. How children experience, resist, challenge, and mediate the complex culture, politics, and social spaces that mark their everyday lives did not seem to warrant the attention such issues deserve, especially in light of the ongoing assaults on minority youth of color and class that have taken place following the Columbine killing spree. Rather than giving rise to a concern for young people, Columbine helped to put into place the development of a youth control complex in which crime has become the fundamental axis through which children’s lives are both defined and monitored while the militarization of schools became the order of the day.

Spencer, J William. “The Contsted Meaning of the Crosses at Columbine.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 52 (10). Pp 1371-1386.
Spontaneous memorials that emerged at Columbine after the shootings became a focal point of news coverage. Especially visible in this discourse were 15 wooden crosses that symbolized the 13 victims of the shootings and the 2 youth who carried out the shootings. The discourse about such memorials has much to reveal about the collective meanings of the events that gave rise to them. In the case of the crosses of Columbine, these meanings are matters of both consensus and contestation. This article examines how the news media constructed the controversy over the crosses through the ways that they represented the shootings, their aftermath, and the participants. It also examines how the resolution to the controversy was constructed from the very language used to construct it. The conclusion examines Columbine’s role as a model for public mourning, one that suggests the victory of traditional senses of moral culpability.

Tonso, Karen. “Violent Masculinities and Tropes for School Shooters: The Montreal Massacre, the Columbine Attack, and Rethinking Schools.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 52(9). Pp 1266-1285
Attacks at Montréal École Polytechnique and Columbine High frame a decade of school shootings and may offer insights into some other rampages. Though times, rationales, and sites of peer-group production differed at these two sites, “school shooter” encoded ways to react in situations where some young men felt unfairly subordinated in society; shooters used deadly violence to assert and reclaim the “rightful” places they felt denied. “School shooter” seemed to borrow from violent masculinities, common socioculturally produced images, or tropes, for acting, implicating not only shooters (who take up extreme versions of these tropes), but also simultaneously everyday sociocultural contexts where violent masculinities are produced, reinforced, and valorized. This article suggests the importance of context to the production of shooters and as such competes with attempts to develop remedies to school shootings grounded in de-contextualized, individualistic approaches that focus only on shooters.

2010
Warnick, Bryan, et al. “Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings.” Educational Theory. Vol 60(3). Pp 370-370
Abstract. School shootings are traumatic events that cause a community to question itself, its values, and its educational systems. In this article Bryan Warnick, Benjamin Johnson, and Samuel Rocha explore the meanings of school shootings by examining three recent books on school violence. Topics that grow out of these books include (1) how school shootings might be seen as ceremonial rituals, (2) how schools come to be seen as appropriate places for shootings, and (3) how advice to educators relating to school shootings might change the practice of teaching. The authors present various ways of understanding school shootings that may eventually prove helpful, but they also highlight the problems, tensions, and contradictions associated with each position. In the end, the authors argue, the circumstances surrounding school shootings demonstrate the need for the ‘‘tragic sense’’ in education. This need for the tragic sense, while manifest in many different areas of schooling, is exemplified most clearly in targeted school shootings.

2012
Twemlow, Stuart. “Book Review Essay: The Columbine Tragedy Ten Years Later: Psychoanalytic Reminiscences and Reflections.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Vol 60(1). pp 171–180.
Twemlow reviews three books: David Cullen’s Columbine, Peter Langman’s Why Kids Kill, and Jeff Kass’s Columbine: A True Crime Story. He explores the insights and perspectives on Harris and Klebold and the shooting at Columbine, with particular attention to psychoanalytic details. Twemlow employs information gleaned from the books, and his own psychoanalytical research which includes the treatment of a Columbine student who left the school six months prior to the massacre because of intense bullying, to propose that a “cult like” mindset was prevalent at Columbine.

2018
Raitanen, Jenni and Atte Oksanen. “Global Online Subculture Surrounding School Shootings.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 62(2) pp 195-209.
This study is grounded in extensive online ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 22 people who expressed a deep interest in school shootings. Such people form a global online subculture; they share common interests and find the same cultural objects important. Media accounts of school shootings have fueled this subculture; its members participate in the re-creation and circulation of online media content and give new meanings to that content. We found that people deeply interested in school shootings do not form a homogenous group, and they are divided into four subgroups within the subculture based on members’ focus and interest: researchers, fan girls, Columbiners, and copycats. Out of these, copycats are the only subgroup explicitly interested in replicating the acts, although subgroup membership can overlap, and members can move from one subgroup to another. Beyond copycats, other subgroups also participate in giving perpetrators fame and circulate reasons for the shootings. These accounts may influence future perpetrators.

So, since everything that normally keeps me occupied has been canceled, I'm going through more of the articles and book chapters I have. I figure some of you might be looking for something to do, to read, too.

A couple book chapters

2008. Wilson, Scott. “Columbine,” in Great Satan’s Rage: American negativity and rap/metal in the age of supercapitalism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
In the wake of Columbine, violent media—music, films, and video games—were blamed for desensitizing and encouraging the perpetrators to commit their massacre. It is the idea of consumption that Wilson looks at here. Wilson employs Webber and Battaille to analyze the idea of consumption and its role in Columbine. He plots out the co-ordinates of the terrain both shaped and traversed by the forces of  supercapitalism as it informs institutional practices and produces subjectivities. That is to say that if there is a psychological structure at stake here, it not so much that of Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold but of supercapitalism itself as it applies to the production of subjectivity in schools. In this context, popular cultural artifacts become important not because they cause students to kill but, on the contrary, because they provide compensatory fantasies that enable belief and therefore participation in the system.

2016. McWilliams, David. “Fear and Loathing in Suburbia: School shootings.” In Violence in American Popular Culture Vol 1. ed David Schmidt. Praeger.
In this chapter, McWilliams explores the reasons behind national attention to school shootings, focusing on Columbine. He looks to popular portrayals of Harris and Klebold as goths, the idea of the goth subculture as a threat to suburban ideas of security, and the ensuing moral panic surrounding teenagers who dress in black. He likewise traces the development of Harris and Klebold as sympathetic, troubled figures, and looks at fictional portrayals of school shooters in print and on film before and after Columbine. Tying all of these threads together, McWilliams proposes the school shooter as an ambiguous figure—one caught between childhood and adulthood, murderer and inhuman monster.

And a few articles... Morton's is great for making a pointed critique of Cullen's book, enjoyed reading this.

2010. Griffiths, Richard. “The gothic folk devils strike back! Theorizing folk devil reaction in the post-Columbine era.” Journal of Youth Studies. Vol. 13, No. 3, June 2010, 403-422.
Folk devils have to date been significantly overlooked in previous studies of moral panics. While several studies have called attention to this problematic (Thornton and McRobbie 1995, De Young 2004, Lumsden 2009), no specific theoretical framework has been proposed for reading this dimension of a moral panic. This paper argues that a moral panic erupted over the gothic subculture following the horrific Columbine High School massacre of 20 April 1999. This paper subsequently offers a theoretical model for understanding how goths as folk devils reacted to their representation by the mainstream news media after this tragic event. Until the early 2000s very little scholarship had been produced on the gothic subculture. Instead researchers interested in the study of youth chose to focus on other subcultures, such as punk and club cultures. Although studies by Hodkinson (2002) and Brill (2008) have contributed comprehensive insights about goth to youth and subcultural studies, the subject of how goths have been the subject of moral panics has not been addressed in significant detail. This paper seeks to address this neglect, while also providing researchers interested in moral panics and youth culture a conceptual framework for better understanding folk devil reactions.

2011. Lankford, Adam and Nayab Hakim. “From Columbine to Palestine: A comparative analysis of rampage shooters in the United States and volunteer suicide bombers in the Middle East.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 16. Pp 98–107.
Previous research comparing rampage shooters in the U.S. and volunteer suicide bombers in the Middle East appears to be virtually non-existent. When these two types of suicidal killers have been mentioned in the same context, it has primarily been to dismiss any possible connections. Rampage shooters are generally assumed to be mentally unbalanced, while suicide bombers are seen as extreme, but rational, political actors. However, this review explores the possibility that the primary differences between the two types of killers are cultural, not individual, and that in terms of their underlying psychology and motivation, they are actually quite similar. In both cases, substantial evidence indicates that these perpetrators of murder–suicide share many of the following characteristics: (1) they had troubled childhoods, (2) they lived in oppressive social environments, (3) they suffered from low self-esteem, (4) they were triggered by a personal crisis, (5) they were seeking revenge, and (6) they were seeking fame and glory.

2014. Schlidkraut, Jaclyn and Glenn Muschert. “Media Salience and the Framing of Mass Murder in Schools: A Comparison of the Columbine and Sandy Hook Massacres.” Homicide Studies. Vol. 18(1) 23–43
Several high-profile school shootings have emerged as significant discursive markers in a longer “disaster narrative.” This study applies the two-dimensional analytic framework introduced by Chyi and McCombs to examine the frame-changing differences between two highly salient school shootings. A content analysis was conducted using the New York Times coverage of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The findings of this study indicate that while Columbine set the precedent for how the media covers school shootings, the coverage of Sandy Hook illustrates a departure from this model and potentially reshapes the way that these events are covered.

2015. Morton, Lindsay. “Where are You Coming From?: Truth Claims in David Cullen’s Columbine.” Journalism Practice. Vol. 9, No. 2, pp 168–183.
The increasing prominence of transparency as a news value warrants discussion over its effects in various forms of media. Literary journalism provides a useful platform to assess the function of transparency because of its position on the margins of mainstream journalistic practice. This paper analyses the function of disclosure and participatory transparency against the truth-claims of a book-length work of literary journalism. It concludes that while transparency is valuable in building a journalist’s credibility, significant thought needs to be given to how disclosure transparency interacts with the rhetorical effects of narrative in sustaining the truth-claims made about a text.

2018. Raitanen, Jenni and Atte Oksanen. “Global Online Subculture Surrounding School Shootings.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol 62(2) pp 195-209.
This study is grounded in extensive online ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 22 people who expressed a deep interest in school shootings. Such people form a global online subculture; they share common interests and find the same cultural objects important. Media accounts of school shootings have fueled this subculture; its members participate in the re-creation and circulation of online media content and give new meanings to that content. We found that people deeply interested in school shootings do not form a homogenous group, and they are divided into four subgroups within the subculture based on members’ focus and interest: researchers, fan girls, Columbiners, and copycats. Out of these, copycats are the only subgroup explicitly interested in replicating the acts, although subgroup membership can overlap, and members can move from one subgroup to another. Beyond copycats, other subgroups also participate in giving perpetrators fame and circulate reasons for the shootings. These accounts may influence future perpetrators.

Some of the articles that have since been posted here are no longer available. Does anyone have back-ups?

QuestionMark wrote:

Some of the articles that have since been posted here are no longer available. Does anyone have back-ups?

i don't have any backups, but you can try searching for the article you want through zlibrary or library genesis there's so many articles (and books btw) u can download for free through these websites

Censorship of Student Internet Speech: The Effect of Diminishing Student Rights, Fear of the Internet and Columbine

Written in 2000.