Drawing on Lilie Chouliaraki's book Wronged. The weaponization of Victimhood (2024), this seminar aims to deepen participants' understanding of the ways in which public discourse constructs narratives of victimhood and to enable them to explicitly articulate their own critique of these narratives.

We will be focusing on two exercises. The first draws on contemporary examples from our political and cultural scene to reflect on the ways in which linguistic "tropes of cruelty" operate in everyday conversations to sustain relations of symbolic violence.

The second utilises a specific case study to apply the methodological framework of the "heuristics of victimhood" – a systematic list of questions around the actors, communities, emotions and truth claims of victimhood – so as to deconstruct how specific claims to pain create their own political communities while excluding others.

This dual exercise will last for two hours, and each part will consist of both individual reflection and group discussion.

Moderators: Angeliki Sifaki and Júlia Garraio (CES) and Sofia José Santos (FEUC/CES)


Bio note

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor in Media and Communications at the LSE. She has published extensively on the mediation of human vulnerability, humanitarian and human right communication, the ethics of witnessing and, more recently, the cultural politics of victimhood. Her book on the topic, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood (Columbia University Press 2024), is currently being translated in Korean and Japanese, among others. Chouliaraki has published more than 90 articles in international, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and her book publications further include The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006), The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (2013, ICA Outstanding Book Award) and The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022).
 

Activity within the research projects UnCoveR “Violência sexual nas paisagens mediáticas portuguesas” (https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.03964.PTDC) and "Dis/entangling Rape: Sexual Violence in Portuguese literature and cinema in the 21st century" (https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.05885.CEECIND/CP1754/CT0003)

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This activity will be provided through Zoom platform and requires registration