What are the main interests of this new TWG? What questions do you wish to pursue?
Our main concern is the mediation of distant suffering, namely the process through which images of human pain are produced, circulated and become appropriated in the public sphere. Relevant questions have long been debated in relation to media institutions and journalistic practices (for example, on how to report terrorism), among NGOs and humanitarian communications (for instance, on how to campaign for poverty relief and during disaster emergencies) and within policy circles (for example, on how news coverage of migrant and refugee stories may impact on policy making). Across these domains, such questions have distinct empirical and analytical but also theoretical and normative dimensions and point to distinct moral, political and cultural implications that require special attention. It is these issues that we are planning to engage with through the platform of the TWG.
How is this subject of research significant for the current media and communication research? And why is it of importance to the ECREA community?
Over the last couple of decades, the field of media and communication studies has experienced a proliferation of studies questioning the moral role of the media in a globalised world, with a specific focus on the question of communicating human vulnerability. A number of theorists and researchers have been exploring how encounters with humanity in its most vulnerable forms are entangled with power and how they may expand the spaces of moral imagination, forging post-national bonds of cosmopolitan solidarity. This academic focus reflects contemporary political, social and cultural developments and relevant public debates. Victims of violence, natural disasters and terrorist attacks routinely feature in the daily news. Digital media – as used by sufferers as well as representing suffering – intensify and complicate encounters with human vulnerability. At the same time, the voices of ongoing humanitarian crises and conflicts often get sidelined and under-reported. The refugee crisis and its European coverage have thrown these questions into relief with a renewed urgency, as the reporting of the issue has significant implications for policy decisions and public support for the refugees.
The growing interest in such questions has been reflected in the proliferation of relevant publications, academic conferences and university teaching. In the last ECREA conference a number of panels were exclusively dedicated to the mediation of the refugee ‘crisis’. We believe that the new TWG is an acknowledgment of the significance of this subfield within ECREA and that it will be an intellectual platform for all these colleagues within the community working in relevant areas.
To which scholars should this new TWG be of most interest – whom do you wish to address and invite to join?
We are aiming at using the TWG as a platform for dialogue, cooperation and networking, bringing together academics from different subfields and various stages in their academic career whose work is currently dispersed across the different thematic sections of ECREA but who share an interest in the question of communicating human vulnerability. Such colleagues might come from the field of journalism, humanitarian communication, critical discourse studies, migration studies, media globalization, visual communication, media ethics, moral and political philosophy.
Can you please present the management team?
Lilie Chouliaraki, our chair, is Professor at the London School of Economics and leading figure in the field. Her monograph The Spectatorship of Suffering (Sage, 2006/2011) is a seminal work of textual analysis of television news and of the global hierarchies of place and human life they reproduce and her more recent study on the mediation of solidarity won her the Outstanding Book of the Year Award at the 2015 ICA for The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post Humanitarianism (2013, Polity Press). Maria Kyriakidou, vice-chair, is a Lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University working on the relationship between media and globalisation, and particularly the mediation of cosmopolitan solidarity through the coverage of crises and human suffering. Metter Mortensen, our other vice-chair, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. She has published a monograph on Journalism and Eyewitness Images: Digital Media, Participation and Conflict (2015, Routledge) and is currently the Principal Investigator on a research project on Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images (2017-2021, Velux Foundation).
Lilie Chouliaraki, Maria Kyriakidou, Metter Mortensen
What are your next plans (short and long term)?
We are currently organising a very exciting panel for the ECREA 2018 Lugano conference, when we will introduce the new TWG group. We are hoping that a lot of colleagues will join us then to discuss ideas and the future directions of the group. We aim to organise a symposium in 2019 about which we will have more details at Lugano. Overall, we are planning to use the TWG as a space for constructive dialogue and networking, as well as a space for collaboration and the emergence of new research paths.
Please visit the ECREA intranet to join the TWG and subscribe to the TWG’s forum to keep informed and updated.
Tereza Pavlickova
