Lilie Chouliaraki

Lilie Chouliaraki is a professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). She is known for her research in the mediation of human suffering on mass and digital media, but also in interpretative methodologies in social research, particularly discourse, visual and multi-modal analysis.

Career 
Chouliaraki received her bachelors in philosophy at the University of Athens, and both her MA and PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University.

Chouliaraki’s research has focused on four domains where suffering appears as a problem of communication: disaster news, humanitarian campaigns and celebrity advocacy, war & conflict reporting, and migration. The International Journal of Communication describes Chouliaraki’s scholarly work as a “plea for a critical observation and profound empirical analysis of the discursive reproduction of injustice, symbolic inequalities, and representational hierarchies in the mediation of suffering”

Her publications include 'Discourse in Late Modernity' (1999), ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering' (2006), ‘The Soft Power of War' (ed., 2008), ‘Media, Organizations, Identity' (2009), ‘Self-mediation. New Media, Citizenship and Civic Selves’ (ed. 2012) and ‘The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism' (2013) as well as sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her work is widely cited and has been published in French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Greek and (currently) in Chinese. She is the recipient of three international awards for her articles and books.

In 2014, Chouliaraki in Media Ethics & Humanitarianism discussed with Prof. Conor Gearty 'the moral implications of the use of celebrities by humanitarian organisations' in the YouTube video debates Gearty Grilling.

She is currently board member of the journals ‘Discourse and Society’; ‘Visual Communication’; ‘Social Semiotics’; ‘Critical Discourse Studies’; ’Crime, Media, Culture’; ‘Journal of Language and Politics’, ’JOMEC Journal’, ’Popular Communication’, ’Digital Journalism’. She has been a judge at The Guardian’s International Development Competition, 2012 and 2013.

Chouliaraki has lectured for major NGOs, such as Amnesty International (UK, Finland) and Doctors without Borders (Germany) on the development of their communication agendas and strategies.

Contributions

Aestheticization of war and war reporting 
In 'The aestheticization of suffering on television', Chouliaraki's analyzes " war footage in order to trace the ways in which the tension between presenting airwar as an 'objective' piece of news and as an instance of intense human suffering is resolved in television's strategies of mediation". Specifically, Chouliaraki argues that the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq war was filmed in long-shot and presented in a quasiliterary narrative that capitalized on an aesthetics of horror, on sublime spectacle (Boltanski). She says that the "aestheticization of suffering on television is thus produced by a visual and linguistic complex that eliminates the human pain aspect of suffering, whilst retaining the phantasmagoric effects of a tableau vivant", producing an "aestheticization of suffering [that] manages simultaneously to preserve an aura of objectivity and impartiality, and to take a pro-war side in the war footage".

Chouliaraki's research on war reporting focuses on mobile phone footage from post-Arab Spring conflict zones, exploring how major news platforms accommodate Twitter, amateur videos and other genres, such as selfies, in their news stories.  Her argument is that war journalism has shifted from reporting, that is providing information on the development of military operations, to witnessing, that is focusing on civilian suffering and death.

Mediation of Solidarity 
In her boo The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism, Chouliaraki explored how solidarity activism has changed in the course of the past fifty years. Looking into NGO appeals, rock concerts, celebrity advocacy and post-television disaster news, she demonstrates how major institutional (the commercialisation of the aid and development field), technological (the rise of new media) and political (the fall of grand narratives) transformations have also changed the ways we are invited to act on distant others who need our support. When famine is described through our own experience of dieting, solidarity with Africa translates into buying Christmas presents from a charity website and supporting a cause is about following our favourite celebrity on Twitter, Chouliaraki argues, then solidarity is less about vulnerable others and more about 'us'.

This is what she calls post-humanitarian solidarity, a form of solidarity that is no longer about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not the needs of others but our own - turning us into the ironic spectators of other people's suffering.

Mediation of Migration 
This two-year research project, co-led by Chouliaraki, focused on the 2015 migration crisis in Europe and provided an integrated overview of its digital mediations in press and on the ground. The project focused both on online news headlines in eight European countries in the period July–December 2015; and on the use of digital media on the ground, in one of the Greek border islands, where migrants first arrived. In this double focus, the project is the first one to approach the mediation of the migration crisis in terms of both its narrative border (content analysis of online press in terms of headline language and images) and its territorial border (participant observation  on Chios island that maps out the actors and uses of social media and other digital equipment for purposes on migrant reception).

Discourse Theory and Analysis 
Chouliaraki is co-author of 'Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis' (with Norman Fairclough EUP, 1999), an agenda-setting volume for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The argument of the book is that discourse is neither code nor structure but practice, an inherent dimension of social action in the world. Starting from this premise, it further argues that CDA is strongly positioned to address empirical research and theory-building across the social sciences, particularly research and theory on the semiotic/linguistic aspects of the social world. It situates critical discourse analysis as a form of critical social research in relation to diverse perspectives from the philosophy of science to social theory and from political science to sociology and linguistics. Further work of Chouliaraki on Critical Discourse Analysis explores discourse as practice through a discussion of three different versions of constructivist epistemologies and discusses how  we can research the social world when we do not believe in 'objective' reality.

Publications

Books 
 The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (2013) 
 Self-Mediation. New Media, Citizenship and Civil Selves (2012), 
 Media Organizations, Identity (2009, with Mette Morsing), 
 The Soft Power of War (2008), 
 The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006), 
 Discourse in Late Modernity (1999, with Norman Fairclough),

Selected articles 
 Chouliaraki Lilie (2017) Symbolic Bordering: The self-representation of refugees in digital news. Popular Communication 15 (2): 78-94.
 Chouliaraki Lilie and Georgiou Myria (2016) Hospitability: The Communicative Architecture of Humanitarian Securitization at Europe's Borders Journal of Communication 67(2): 159–180.
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2013) Re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation. Journalism Studies, 14 (2). pp. 267–283
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2013) Mediating vulnerability: cosmopolitanism and the public sphere. Media, Culture and Society, 35 (1). pp. 105–112.
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2010) Post-humanitarianism: humanitarian communication beyond a politics of pity. International journal of cultural studies, 13 (2). pp. 107–126.
 Chouliaraki Lilie and Fairclough Norman (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis in Organizational Studies: Towards an integrationist methodology. Journal of Management Studies 47 (6): 1213–1218.
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2010) Ordinary witnessing in post-television news: towards a new moral imagination. Critical Discourse Studies, 7 (4). pp. 305–319. 
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2008) The Mediation of suffering and the vision of a cosmopolitan public. Television & new media, 9 (5). pp. 371–391. ISSN 1552-8316 
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2006) Aestheticization of suffering on television. Visual Communication, 5 (3). pp. 261–285. 
 Chouliaraki, Lilie (2004) Watching 11 September: the politics of pity. Discourse & Society, 15 (2-3). pp. 185–198.

Selected reviews
 "This book achieves a rare combination of opening new analytical and theoretical ground while retaining direct and lucid engagement with critical and urgent human concerns." The British Journal of Sociology
 "The Ironic Spectator, therefore, is not only an eminent work of media studies scholarship that presents a detailed and inspiring analytical framework. Its theorization of post-humanitarianism and the aesthetic and sociopolitical questions posed by new media practices deserves to earn it a wide readership in all disciplines interested in contemporary popular culture and world politics." European Journal of Communication
 "The significance of The Ironic Spectator for students and scholars of contemporary media, international relations, "development", and the broader social sciences, and, ideally, people working within media, for NGOs and INGOs, and the wider humanitarian and development sectors, cannot be overstated." Social Semiotics
 "Chouliaraki conducts an impressive, interdisciplinary analysis. She embraces the paradoxes and ambivalences of each genre, presenting a state of the art critique, and thoroughly analysing the genre's past and present form in order to suggest how the changes in communicative structure may affect how we are invited to act on distant others." The Journal of Development Studies
 "Chouliaraki qualifies as a high priestess of the representation of suffering and how we engage with distant others. She dissects with great clarity exactly what is taking place in this post humanitarian sensibility and how supporters are now being drawn in to apparently care and show solidarity with distant sufferers." LSE Review of Books
 "As refreshing and enervating as a cold mountain spring on a hot day. Chouliaraki has extraordinary ability to condense and parse complex debates briskly." Journal of International Development
 "The Spectatorship of Suffering, by Lilie Chouliaraki, rapidly became a classic, present on almost every key and suggested reading list on courses dealing with global media and international journalism… Therefore, The Ironic Spectator is a more than welcome contribution to this field, offering an opportunity to discuss one of the most pressing issues in media and journalism studies. In this book, she deals with the issue of humanitarian communication, offering a comprehensive set of arguments which makes us think truly out of the box." Digital Journalism
 "Lilie Chouliaraki's The Ironic Spectator is the best journalism book for 2013." Tweet by Prof. Bob Franklin, Cardiff University; editor of Journalism Studies

Honors and awards
 Nominated for Walter Benjamin Outstanding Article Award in the Field of Media Ecology of the Media Ecology Association, New York 2017. Victimhood, voice and power in digital media Simonsen K.M. and Kjaergaard J. R. (eds)  Discursive Framings of Human rights: Negotiating Agency and Victimhood Abingdon: Routledge pp. 247–62.
 Outstanding Book of the Year Award, International Communication Association, 2015. 'The Ironic Spectator:  Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism' (2013) Polity Press, Cambridge.
 Outstanding Paper of the Year Award, Journalism Studies Division,  International Communication Association, 2014. Re-mediation, inter-mediation, trans-mediation (2012) Journalism Studies, 14 (2) pp. 267–283.
 Top Paper of the Year Award, Journalism Studies Division, International Communication Association, 2010. Ordinary witnessing in post-television news: towards a new moral imagination (2010) Critical Discourse Studies, 7 (4) pp. 305–319.

References 

Category:Living people
Category:Academics of the London School of Economics
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:People from Komotini
Category:Alumni of Lancaster University
Category:Greek academics