In this paper I discuss a framework for the analysis of media discourse – the ‘analytics of mediation’ – that takes into account the embeddedness of media texts both in technological artefacts and in social relationships and, hence, seeks to integrate the multi-modal with the critical analysis of discourse. On the methodological level, the analytics of mediation applies a multi-modal discourse analysis onto media texts in order to study their visual and linguistic properties: camera/visual; graphic/pictorial or aural/linguistic. On the social (...) theory level, the analytics of mediation addresses critical concerns on the ethical and political role of television and other media in our ‘global village’. Can television foster a cosmopolitan consciousness or does its ‘fake proximity’ alienate the spectator from the rest of the world? Can we talk about the media as agents of global citizenship or do the media lead to compassion fatigue – a Western denial of humanitarian problems? I illustrate such questions by drawing on one concrete example of television news. (shrink)

The rise of ‘ordinary’ voice in post-television news narratives has drastically transformed the nature of journalistic witnessing. For some, it facilitates connectivity with and action on distant suffering, yet for others, it fragments global connectivity and creates multiple but insulated communities of ‘our own’. It is this changing nature of witnessing, in the move from television to post-television news, and its implications for the moralisation of Western publics that I explore in this paper.

This article takes issue with Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that physical exclusion depends on the hindrance of cognitive associations, emotional quandaries, and moral inhibitions, hence victims and their lot remain out of sight. It is counterargued that conscious engagement in directly physical forms of exclusionary behaviour is possible insofar as victims are known in ways that provoke emotional disdain and moralise violence. Such knowledge consists in the relegation of others to the status of morally lesser human beings, and is produced via (...) prior symbolic mediations. To the extent that mediations operate according to the power differentials they both reflect and help to sustain, there is a need to shift analytical attention from exclusion to the ‘meta-category’ of domination. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual and strategic relationships between corporate identity, organizational identity and ethics, utilizing the Benetton Corporation as an illustrative case study. Although much attention has been given to visual aspects of Benetton's renowned ethical brand building efforts, few studies have looked at how Benetton's employees, retail environments and trade events express ethical aspects of their well-known corporate identity. A multi-method case study, including interviews at retail outlets and trade events, sheds light on several important yet under-studied components of (...) corporate identity, including stakeholders such as retail managers and contract employees. Analysis of Benetton's operations revealed disconnection and inconsistency, as well as a failure to communicate ethical values and socially responsible attributes throughout organizational identity. Operational identity emerged as a useful complement to models of corporate identity. We demonstrate the way in which organizations may fail to capitalize on positive aspects of their organizational identity by neglecting their operational identity. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual and strategic relationships between corporate identity, organizational identity and ethics, utilizing the Benetton Corporation as an illustrative case study. Although much attention has been given to visual aspects of Benetton's renowned ethical brand building efforts, few studies have looked at how Benetton's employees, retail environments and trade events express ethical aspects of their well‐known corporate identity. A multi‐method case study, including interviews at retail outlets and trade events, sheds light on several important yet under‐studied components of (...) corporate identity, including stakeholders such as retail managers and contract employees. Analysis of Benetton's operations revealed disconnection and inconsistency, as well as a failure to communicate ethical values and socially responsible attributes throughout organizational identity. Operational identity emerged as a useful complement to models of corporate identity. We demonstrate the way in which organizations may fail to capitalize on positive aspects of their organizational identity by neglecting their operational identity. (shrink)

Este texto recoge parte de las reflexiones y del desarrollo del capítulo 5 del libro La barbarie que no vimos: Fotografía y memoria en Colombia. Aquí algunas preguntas que se intentan responder en este ensayo: ¿son las tecnologías las únicas responsables de la imposibilidad de ejercer una contemplación activa frente al infortunio de los demás? A propósito de la Parábola del Buen Samaritano, ¿este habría sido reemplazado por el espectador distante o implicado? ¿Qué sucede cuando ese espectador, de tanto ver (...) naufragios, termina fatigado? ¿Y de tanta fatiga, se vuelve indiferente? ¿Qué significa ser espectadores de naufragios en una época en la que la catástrofe no es ocasionada exclusivamente por fuerzas naturales sino por los propios seres humanos? ¿Es posible hallar hoy alguna orilla segura para reconocernos distanciados y salvados de las catástrofes ajenas? (shrink)

Dying serves so often within the narratives of Western popular culture, as an exercise in self-improvement both to the individual dying and to those looking on. It enlightens, ennobles and renders exceptional all those affected by it. Though mainstream cinema's “grammar of dying” is mired in similar myths, film has the potential to do dying differently: it can, instead, connect us, ethically, to the vulnerability of others. The aim of this article is to pursue this potential of film. Using the (...) mainstream grammar of dying as a starting point, I will consider how the moving image, and this ethical potential, is harnessed within two hybrid-media pieces about a loved-one's decline and death: George Saxon's art installation, “A Record of Undying” (2014) and photographer Briony Campbell's short film The Dad Project (2009). While these works will be located within the traditions and transformations of moving image practice, the primary concern here is with how such emotionally resonant pieces navigate our relation to, and responsibility for, our own and others' harsh realities. In this way, the question of ethics is grounded not in the solipsistic circuits of affective modes – whether as the catharsis or betterment of mainstream myths, or what Jane Stadler privileges as the ethical effects of empathy – but in something more inherently, more inevitably, political. (shrink)

News texts about war are clear manifestations of moral meanings, and the analysis of these texts usually centers on the ideal of neutral and fair representation of the war operations without undermining the audience's pity towards the victims of such violence. One aim of this article is to show through a concrete example how war correspondents bridge their moral task as eyewitnesses to disasters and calamities with their professional duty as objective observers, and how they manage, or indeed fail, to (...) bridge a proper distance between the audience and the distant Other. The illustrative example is taken from the Danish broadsheet Jyllands Posten, and it shows how the correspondents managed to, despite their proximity to the Iraqis, mitigate the suffering of war victims. Central to the analysis of proper distance are the journalistic practices that constrain the production of war texts, i.e. the role of war correspondents as eyewitnesses, and the need to adhere to the news value of identification. Finally, I argue for the need to supplement recent studies with cross-cultural comparative analysis of news as a class of texts contingent to a specific production process. (shrink)

The article investigates the implications of mediatization for the legitimation strategies of humanitarian organizations. Based on a corpus of ~400 pages of brochure material from 1970 to 2007, the micro-textual processes involved in humanitarian organizations’ efforts to legitimate themselves and their moral claim were examined. A time trend analysis of the prioritization of actors in the material indicates that marked shifts in legitimation loci have taken place during the past 40 years. A discourse analysis unfolds the three dominant discourses behind (...) these shifts, namely legitimation by accountancy, legitimation by institutionalization, and legitimation by compensation. The analysis relates these changes to a problem of trust associated with mediatization through processes of mediation. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

Humanitarian organizations have in the past 10 years enjoyed immense support with their western publics. At the same time, however, the humanitarian sector is under increasing pressure from various sources, under scrutiny for its administration costs, its marketized practices and its alleged politicization. Some say that humanitarianism is in crisis. This article examines the development of humanitarian advertising through analysis of 124 newspaper ads published in the period from 1970 to 2005. Using a discourse analytical approach which combines institution analysis (...) with multimodal text analysis, it draws out the most marked changes that can be observed in the mode of appeal employed during this period, with a view to understanding the impact of the changing conditions of existence of humanitarian organizations on their public appeal. The article exposes an increasing submission of humanitarian organizations to external demands, in terms of their choice of beneficiaries for public attention and in terms of the symbolic relations they set up between donors and beneficiaries. It is argued that this development is associated with a paradox of power and results in humanitarian organizations surrendering their moral authority and professional expertise. (shrink)

This study critically explores the representation of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes in 15 articles and photographs from local Spanish-language print media with the goal of determining the potential for minoritized semiotic texts to challenge the negative semiotic treatment of Latin@ immigrants in the United States. Following a critical social semiotic approach, the analysis of intersemiotic relationships demonstrates that approximately half of the semiotic texts analyzed communicate an overall transformative message by challenging the negative representations of Latin@s in (...) the mainstream media. The strong presence of transformative ideologies in the verbal and visual modes underscores the potential for Spanish-language media to represent Latin@s as powerful social actors who stand up to negative treatment through activism. Moreover, the contrast of ideologies across the verbal and visual modes may incite the audience to participate in activism that supports Latin@ immigrants in the United States. (shrink)

The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism, by Lilie Chouliaraki, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, 238 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7456-4210-6 The previous work of Li...

ABSTRACTThe specific aim of this study is to investigate how a group of migrant rights activists in Sweden are positioned in news discourse. The more general aim of this study is to understand the conditions under which activists participate within news discourse. Through a critical discourse analytical framework, with specific focus on the use of epistemic and dynamic modalities in the presentation of activists’ statements, the analysis shows what kinds of knowledge claims can be constructed and from what discursive position. (...) Furthermore, the analysis shows what kind of political claims the activists can make. The activists are positioned as ‘dreamers’ in relation to political possibilities and as ‘experiencing individuals’ in relation to knowledge claims. The main conclusion of the article is that journalistic discourse has inherent ideological resources to include activist voices: at the same time, it is able to exclude the political relevance of activism. (shrink)

‘If it bleeds, it leads’, events characterised by fatalities, are likely to attract high levels of media coverage. This study adopts a multidisciplinary approach to investigate public discourses on the MH17 tragedy in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. First, corpus-based discourse analysis was employed to explore the construction of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy MH17 in four selected Malaysian and British newspapers. In addition, an attitudinal study examining 50 Malaysian and 50 UK nationals’ perceptions of the tragedy was conducted. Keywords analysis (...) revealed an overall tendency for the news media to construct the air tragedy through classifications between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Specifically, important ‘Us’ and non-important ‘Other’ in the Malaysian newspapers, versus good ‘Us’ and evil ‘Others’ in the British newspapers. The attitudinal analysis shows, for both the Malaysian and the UK respondents, the most salient associations with the MH17 tragedy related to ‘conflicts’. (shrink)

In 2014, a large archive of hacked nude photos of female celebrities was released on 4chan and organized and discussed primarily on Reddit. This paper explores the ethical implications of this celebrity nude photo leak within a frame of gendered privacy violations. I analyze a selection of a mass capture of 5143 posts and 94,602 comments from /thefappening subreddit, as well as editorials written by female celebrities, feminists, and journalists. Redditors justify the photo leak by arguing the subjects are privileged (...) because they are celebrities; that the celebrities are at fault for failing to appropriately protect their information; and that the only person ethically responsible for the leak is the hacker. The popular press primarily took a feminist perspective, linking the photo leak to institutionalized sexism and misogyny. I argue that the Reddit participants frame the privacy violations within a context of geek masculinity, in which references to masturbation and pornography and casually misogynist language are used to signify a normative masculine self. Privacy violations are de-emphasized when the victims are women and gender or feminist concerns are rejected. Entitlement to viewing women’s bodies and male sexual desire are prioritized over ethical concerns over privacy violations. The paper contributes to understanding how privacy violations are normatively gendered and reinforced by gender inequality. (shrink)

Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they construct and present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance (...) is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011. (shrink)

Based on a nuanced understanding of immersion and sense of presence as two key aesthetic effects that the application of virtual reality to cinema is believed to innovate, this paper develops the concept of synthetic vision as fundamental to understanding the visual experience of VR media, particularly VR documentaries. The concept contends that viewers’ experience in VR is based on two visions that seemingly contradict each other: first, a disembodied vision that transports them to a simulated world, and second, an (...) embodied vision guaranteed by the freedom to control kinesthetic movement and direction of gaze. This serves to advance the idea that immersion and SoP are not unified but rather multifaceted concepts premised on a nuanced understanding of the varying relationships between the technological system of VR, its media content, and its user. For the concept of synthetic vision points to the paradoxical coexistence of viewers’ presence in the virtual world and their structural absence from the world that lays the groundwork for their immersive experience. By classifying three generic categories of contemporary VR documentaries, and by examining the aesthetic and ethical underpinnings VR brings to each of them, I argue that it hinges upon what kind of cinematic conventions and genres are remediated to determine the effective synthesis of the two visions. The varying effects of synthetic vision in the three subgenres of VR documentary stress that immersion and SoP have different political and ethical consequences of media witnessing. In the conclusion, I recapitulate multiple implications that the concept of synthetic vision has in regards to both the studies on VR and the recently flourishing investigation into cinematic VR artifacts. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of the work of western humanitarian NGOs operating in the African continent. We argue that in most cases, NGOs and their supporters are deaf to the actual wants, needs, and desires ? or, in other words, the agency ? of those they are trying to aid. We do this by first offering a series of ways of understanding the ideological commitments that inform the work of many humanitarian NGOs and those who donate to them. (...) In this, we expose the reasons leading to the failure of such individuals and organizations to recognize and take account of the agency of those they seek to help. Second, we offer evidence of the problematic outcome of this failure when coupled with a lack of recognition of the wider context of many of the conflicts that lead to the suffering of those that such NGOs intend to aid. In doing this, we expose the ways in which an NGO's own position can reinforce and contribute to the continuance of this suffering. This, we argue results from the simplified, inaccurate, and de-politicized ways in which NGOs tend to portray the problem of suffering both to those they solicit for donations and in their own conception of the problems and the ?moral? role that the organization itself plays in its work. (shrink)

This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist transformation in the (...) politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change. (shrink)

A British coffee chain’s fundraising practices constitute a background for this study to examine ideological discourses behind British charitable giving. The charity executes projects in coffee growing communities by providing education for children in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The study takes a critical stance from a discursive paradigmatic perspective to analyse visual contents used by the charity. The applied visual critical discourse analysis was inspired by Barthes’ semiotic theory. Findings suggest that the adverts’ interpretative repertoires can serve ideologies that sustain the donors’ (...) social-cultural dominance over the recipients by justifying group-based social hierarchies. The chains of signifiers do not question the spectators’ moral position but rationalise status quo and maintain undisturbed consumption. Findings suggest the possibility that the discourses of prosocial behaviour incited under consuming conditions do not challenge but may even justify global inequality. This finding presents challenges facing charitable organisations balancing their work within wider commercial and cultural contexts. (shrink)

Las tierras arrasadas de Emiliano Monge se encuentra entre el creciente corpus de novelas y películassobre los migrantes centroamericanos y los diferentes tipos de violencia que afrontan. Monge aborda en esta obra los efectos de la militarización en la política migratoria de México, impulsada por la guerra contra el narco que comenzó en 2006. Esta novela lleva a cabo un desmonte crítico del humanitarismo literario al tiempo que enfatiza la vulnerabilidad de los migrantes y su agencia. En tal sentido, se (...) explora la forma en la que, en cuanto ficción posthumanitaria, la novela encarna las diferentes formas en que opera el orden necropolítico en la vulnerabilidad de estos migrantes centroamericanos indocumentados a lo largo de su periplo. (shrink)

ArgumentA number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity (...) problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account. (shrink)

I argue for a broad education in narratives as a way to address several problems found in moral psychology and social cognition. First, an education in narratives will address a common problem of narrowness or lack of diversity, shared by virtue ethics and the simulation theory of social cognition. Secondly, it also solves the ?starting problem? involved in the simulation approach. These discussions also relate directly to theories of empathy with special significance given to situational empathy.