School of Social and Political Sciences
- School of Social and Political Sciences
- SPS seminar series
- 2015-16
- Prof Lilie Chouliaraki
Post-humanitarianism: The contemporary politics of solidarity
- Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Department of Media & Communications, LSE
- Thursday 19th November, 4 pm - 6 pm, W/222
- Production team: Alice Lasek, Vicky Rabin and Olyfermi Johnson
Seminar synopsis
In this lecture, I discuss historical change in the communication of solidarity, within the fields of human rights and humanitarian communication. To this end, I present a typology of forms of solidarity, dominant in the past 50 years, and focus, in particular, on a new form, what I call a 'post-humanitarian' solidarity, which tends to focus on 'us' rather than distant sufferers as the moral source for action on their suffering. Drawing on specific examples of this emerging form of solidarity, I explore its key features and reflect on its moral and political implications.
Professor Chouliaraki
Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She has written extensively on distant suffering as a problem of communication (in the genres of disaster news, humanitarian appeals, celebrity advocacy, war and conflict reporting among others). She is the author of fifty international, peer-review articles and book chapters; as well as the author or editor of seven book volumes, including 'Discourse in Late Modernity (1999, Edinburgh University Press), 'The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006/2011); 'The Soft Power of War (ed, 2008) and 'The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism' (2013), Outstanding Book Award 2015, International communication Association).