May 20, 2022

 12.00 pm (CEST time)

 Registration

 Zoom 

The affective politics of populist victimhood in the pandemic by Lilie Chouliaraki, professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract: In the context of the covid-19 public health crisis, the greatest in a century, my lecture asks how authoritarian populist leaders, elected on the basis of a political imagination of the people-as-victims and hence on the promise to protect people from their enemies (the “corrupt elites” or the “migrants”), managed the challenge of communicating the suffering and death of the pandemic, largely caused by their own policies, to their national communities. An obvious response would be that they did so through lies. While this is certainly the case, my argument is that we need to go beyond the singular focus on deception and analyse populist discourse on the pandemic as a broader set of symbolic strategies that perform the category “people” at the very moment that they claim to address it. This critical analysis, I contend, has something important to tell us not so much about these leaders’ pandemic failures but, importantly, about the place and role of victimhood in populist politics and contemporary culture.

LILIE CHOULIARAKI is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on the ethical and political complexities of communicating human suffering in the media with particular emphasis on four domains in which suffering appears as a problem of communication: disaster news; humanitarian and human rights advocacy; war & conflict reporting and migration news. Her most recent work is on the cultural politics of victimhood in western societies. Her book on the topic is forthcoming in Columbia University Press, New York (2023).