Lilie Chouliaraki


Lilie Chouliaraki is a professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. 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', ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering', ‘The Soft Power of War', ‘Media, Organizations, Identity', ‘Self-mediation. New Media, Citizenship and Civic Selves’ and ‘The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism' 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 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 and Doctors without Borders 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. 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 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, technological and political 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 and its territorial border.

Discourse Theory and Analysis

Chouliaraki is co-author of 'Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis', an agenda-setting volume for Critical Discourse Analysis. 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