SESSIONS L
Thursday 15:45–17:15
L1 Online participation
Chair: Ursula Ganz-Blättler, University of St.Gall, Switzerland
New Media / New Feminism(s): The Lebanese Womes’s Movement Goes Online
Nelia Hyndman-Rizk, UNSW Canberra / University of Tampere,
Australia
The upsurge in citizen’s rights campaigns across the Middle East during the Arab Spring has
focused media and scholarly attention on the role of new media technologies in facilitating
processes of social change and the related problem of technological determinism. However,
the Arab Spring has also highlighted the role of women in social uprisings and revived the
scholarly debate on the relationship between citizen’s rights and women’s rights in
processes of social transformation. This paper will contribute to the scholarly conversation
by examining the resurgence in women's rights activism in Lebanon and the role of new
media technologies in campaigns for women’s citizenship and nationality rights, a women’s
quota in parliament and the introduction of a unified civil status code. The paper asks: has
new media technology enabled the Lebanese women’s movement to enter a new and more
radical phase in its development?
Social Media, editorial codes and widening participation in domestic news
coverage
Bernhard Gross, University of the West of England, United Kingdom
Social media has shown to have the potential to broaden the scope of public
communication and public sphere processes. In repressive societies or contexts it can
function as an alternative public sphere; but it also allows citizens in open, democratic
societies to participate more actively. At the same time established mainstream media
institutions retain a dominant position. This paper explores the relationship between
editorial policies, guidelines and regulations in the UK context, regarding the use of social
media as sources in domestic news coverage and discusses this in relation to widening
participation. These codes govern everyday journalistic practice and hence shape individual
journalist’s behaviour in relation to sourcing. An assessment of the extent to which these
codes enable or inhibit underrepresented voices to enter mainstream news coverage more
widely may add to an understanding of whether social media as source can address
questions relating to the problem of news access.
147
Safe on my phone?: safety, risk and selfies
Kath Albury, University of New South Wales, Australia
Drawing on three focus group interviews with same-sex-attracted young people (aged 18-26)
in Sydney, Australia, this paper considers the ways that the exchange of selfies within
dating/hook-up apps can be simultaneously understood as both 'risky' and 'safe'. The
mobile or cell phone featured in interviews as a private container for highly-charged
intimate interactions, reflecting Lasen's (2004) description of the mobile as an 'affective
technology'. Participants discussed their everyday, 'public' use of geo-locative apps such as
Grindr and Brenda in ambivalent terms, weighing up the potential risk of 'outing', deception
and bullying against the pleasure of sharing sexual images and texts with friends, lovers and
strangers. This paper seeks to explore the role that mobiles and apps play as 'containers' of
sexuality and intimacy, and the ways that users seek to simultaneously share sexual selfimages, while guarding against overexposure.
L2 Queer affect?
Chair: Ron Gabriel Dor, Northwestern University, United States
Train of justice, love me queer. About performative affects
Andreas Hudelist, Alpen-Adria-Universität, Austria
With Relational Aesthetics the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud revived the discussions
about participation and agency involved in the reception of works of art. As a curator, he
promoted forms of interactive art in which through an event art production and reception
occur simultaneously. Taking up the concept of the spectacle by Guy Debord, Claire Bishop
claims that we can think contemporary art without spectators because today everybody is a
producer. Taking this recent discussions on participatory art I will discuss two different art
projects. The first one is RAUBZUG|VLAK STRAHU|TRAIN OF JUSTICE, a six hour journey
by train to different places in south Austria to thematize the sites of the Second World War
and the deportation of the carinthian-slovenian minority. The second is the theatre play
ROMEO AND JULIA. LOVE ME QUEER. Romeo played by a woman and Julia played by a
man were not the only irritating figures or elements of the staging. With interviews of actors,
visitors and directors I will show that there are different qualities of participation that lead us
to a diverse understanding of agency. In this paper I want to focus on the affective and
performative potential of deconstructing history and gender. What does the art project do
with the audience? What does the audience do with the performative projects?
Shopping makes me queerific? Identity negotiation for the Taiwanese gay men in
the nascent pink economy
Hongchi Shiau, Shih-Hsin University, Taiwan
This study is fueled by the long interest by queer theory researchers in the role of gender in
cultural practices by examining the socialization of gender as a performance(Butler 1990).
Contexts relating to the broader socioeconomic conditions of shopping were captured and
analysed. It aims to explicate the lived experience of "self-identified" shopping queens in
Taiwan to see how they respond to the nascent pink economy from dramaturgical
148
perspective (Hoffman, 1967). Data were collected via three-year participant observation
complemented with ethnographic interviews with 8 gay men in Taiwan. The findings are
organized into three themes: (1) shopping as embodiment of queer, (2) insiders versus
outsiders (3) queer capital accumulation. Finally, this study illuminates that larger global
economic and political forces have vociferously shaped, dispersed, and altered ways of
performing a desirable self for Taiwanese gay men in the age of globalization.
Stone Butch and Innocent Femme: The Gender Identities of Queer Females in
Chinese Femslash Fan Literature
Jing Jamie Zhao, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This research focuses on queer representations of female subjectivities and sexualities in
online Chinese femslash fan literature. My analysis centers on the romantic and/or sexual
encounters between stone butch and innocent femme in several works of sensational fan
fiction published on one of the most popular Chinese femslash fan siteFSCN. The fictions are
all devoted to slashing Chinese androgynous female TV celebrities. Departing from the
prevalent scholarly understanding of the butch/femme divide as a recasting of
heteronormative binarism and patriarchal hierarchy, I demystify this radical construction of
lesbian gender identities in Chinese femslash literature as a discursive strategy of defiance
against the hegemonic codes of masculinity and femininity inscribed in Chinese historical,
cultural, and political discourses. Through presenting a more nuanced account of queer
gender identification, I ultimately endeavor to reveal the new possibilities of queer female
subject formation opened up by online Chinese queer writings.
L3 Food and travel
Chair: Billur Dokur, Kadir Has University, Turkey
Expat Kitchens in Istanbul: Reading Cultural Identities Through Foodways
Billur Dokur, Kadir Has University, Turkey
Focusing on the complex relationship between food and culture, this paper intends to
explore how expat women living in Istanbul (i) reflect and negotiate their cultural identities
through food and (ii) contribute in the making of Istanbul's culinary culture. Concentrating
on the close relationship between food, home and migration with a feminist perspective, the
paper aims to discuss how expat women experience and remake their local and global
identities through food; how they perform these identities in public and private spheres and
how the culinary culture of Istanbul is deconstructed via local and global networks of food.
Taking cues from culinary ethnography, the paper will present an analysis of food-based indepth interviews with expat women living in Istanbul, along with observations based on
participant observation.
Culinary Tourism: Heritage, land, and the tourist gaze
Christina Ceisel, Hamilton College, United States
This piece interrogates the historical present through the lens of culinary tourism and
heritage foodways, positing that the contemporary interest in authenticity and heritage are
149
emblematic of a populism that has the potential to be emancipatory and liberating or
reactionary. I read these trajectories through foodways and the recent rise in popularity of
culinary tourism. The turn to nostalgia as a mode of consumerism relies the investment in
space as place, as well as the articulation and recuperation of primordial identities that
reinforce boundaries between local communities and "elsewhere." Qualitative and
interpretive methodologies structure the study the tensions between tradition and modernity
as performance ethnography and the autoethnographic voice weave through an examination
of policy, affect, history, and culture.
Decolonizing Reel Foods: Recognizing the Positioning of Colonizers' Foods in
Native Films
April Lindala, Northern Michigan University, United States
The colonial act of removal of Native peoples from their traditional homelands in the U.S.
and Canada caused significant detachment from environments with which Native peoples
held deep relationships, specifically to food sources. Such detachment has contributed to
physical health concerns such as heart disease and diabetes. In recent years Indigenous
foods movements made up of individuals attempting to eat a healthier diet of traditional
foods, have been sprouting up throughout the U.S. and Canada. This paper’s author took
part in the year-long Decolonizing Diet Project, a study that explored the relationship
between humans and Indigenous foods within Anishinaabe traditional homelands. Upon
completing the study, this author now re-evaluates how the positioning of colonizers’ foods
within popular Native films consequently circumvents the progress towards indigenous food
sovereignty. How do we critically examine these Native films and articulate the need for a
shift in values in relation to foods and the physical and spiritual health of Indigenous
peoples?
L4 (Counter)hegemonies in the internet
Chair: Risto Kunelius, University of Tampere, Finland
Wikipedia: Communist peer production or liberal complement to capitalism?
Arwid Lund, Department of ALM, Sweden
Peer production can be understood as a mode of production that is proto-communist and
potentially antagonistic to capitalism. How the peer producers relate to capitalism is
however an open question. I investigate the attitudes of Wikipedians in a case study of the
Swedish language version consisting of eight qualitative, semi-structured interviews, to
inform the understanding of radical positions. To understand what politics can arise out of
practice we have to take in economic and social relations, and concrete modes of
producing. The copy left license is here fundamental and I investigate how Wikipedians
value the control of it and look at its influences on work and social relations. One group of
informants gives copy right more importance, differing internally between an individual and
collective focus, another group mainly does not care. Final discussion of what constitutes
the most radical way forward.
150
Internet Celebrity as Hegemonic Political Project: Organic Crisis of Governance
in China
Zhongxuan Lin, University of Macau, Macao
This study focused on the neglected but essential political dimension, the “spectral”, of
celebrity studies, seeing celebrity in itself political thereby presenting the political in the very
heart of celebrity studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork of two years’ online and offline
participant observation and twelve in-depth interviews, this study provided a contextual
analysis of the practice of Chinese Internet celebrity, explaining why and how Chinese
Internet celebrity, originally as a way of governmentality in China, comes out to be a
hegemonic political project of the grassroots, kind of tepid populism and tiny revolution of
the “people”, by the “people”, for the “people” – the netizens. This kind of political
paradigm shift, from “the politics of the governor” to “the politics of the governed”,
implicates an organic crisis of governance in China, and more complicated relationship of
full inner entwinement – like Tai Chi – between the state and the society.
#aufschrei – The role of twitter for feminist protest and as platform for
alternative publics
Ricarda Drüeke, University of Salzburg, Austria & Elke Zobl, University
of Salzburg, Austria
“We should collect our experiences under a hashtag. I suggest aufschrei” – with this tweet
Anne Wizorek initiated together with Nicole von Horst on January 24th, 2013 a wideranging debate on forms of sexism in everyday life in Germany. Following an allegation of
sexism by a journalist in the German newspaper Stern against the (former) chairman of the
Free Democratic Party (FDP) Parliamentary Group Rainer Brüderle, the twitter community
was invited to share experiences on the topic of sexism. In this paper we will discuss how
the hashtag #aufschrei developed and spread rapidly and how the debate is still continuing
online and is initiating other projects on- and offline, such as #schauhin, a campaign against
racism. But we will also consider reactions of antifeminists and critiques of the campaign
within queer-feminist contexts. Referring to feminist protest forms in the context of the
theoretical discourse of counter-publics and subaltern publics (Fraser 2001), we will discuss
the question of how online publics build an “activist” or “advocacy sector” (Dahlgren 2005:
157) for feminist issues and question hegemonic structures.
L5 Crisis and representation
Chair: Emilia Palonen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Creating enduring meaning in the 21st century? What journalists write about
crisis and change and what is remembered in the public sphere?
Dimitri Prandner, University of Salzburg, Austria
The 21st century has seen several events referenced as turning points for societies. The
attacks of 9/11, the economic crisis and the crisis of European union are but a few examples.
They are bestowed with societal meaning and relevance, while getting embedded into
ongoing cultural narratives of different societies, as central actors hailing from politics,
media and even civil society reference upon them. But on which premise do they bestow
151
meaning? What is remembered in societies that are not or not directly influenced by events
and their fallouts? As narrative structures are continuously (re-)figured to be included in the
on-going societal, economic or political crisis certain nation states face, these questions are
followed up with 26 interviews conducted with journalists of the Austrian quality press that
did and continue to build narratives associated with internationally relevant events and how
specific parts of the Austrian public spheres remember them (n=847)
Legitimation mechanisms in the crisis discourse
Vaia Doudaki, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
A locus of major interest and critique amongst media studies scholars has been the media’s
potential of creating society-wide resonance for specific constructions and definitions of
reality. Relevant is the discussion on their role in echoing and legitimizing the hegemonic
discourse over critical issues for societies. Informed by these ideas, this study, focusing on
how the Greek legacy press structured the discourse on the bailout agreements the country
signed with the troika, explores the mechanisms of legitimizing the implementation of the
bailouts. The analysis points to the discursive mechanisms of naturalization, rationalization
and institutionalization that empower the reconstruction of the crisis reality.
Representation of the Representation Studies in Iran
Abbas Varij Kazemi, Trinity College, United States & Mahboube Haj
Hoseini, University of Tehran, United States
This article examines Iranian cultural studies in the field of representation studies. Our main
question asks how Iranian cultural studies researches apply the method of representation
and, more importantly, how we can apply the method of representation studies to the
studies of representation in Iran. We also ask, to what extent can we follow that traces of
power (biases) in “critical research” itself. The results demonstrate that representation studies
in Iran operate as a part of ideological state apparatuses in two ways: First, they reinforce
cultural clichés; and second, they overlook subjects that power centers do not wish to be
studied.
In the first case, the subordinate groups such as women, youth, and ethnic minorities
are studied only as identities after they have become “cultural clichés” in the media. In the
process universities and research centers reproduce cultural clichés through such studies. In
the second case, specific issues related to religious and sexual minorities and immigrants are
overlooked or deemphasized because they are believed to be politically too sensitive in the
view of power centers. We conclude that although cultural studies was supposed to be the
advocate of the subordinate groups, in Iran it has further marginalized the disenfranchised
and voiceless groups by producing knowledge that is in the service of power.
L6 Popular Culture Museums and Transnational
Memory
Chair: Mariko Murata, Kansai University, Japan
Globalization has accelerated the transnationality of media and popular culture. Today we
share the same TV programs, the same popular music, and the same fashion, through
‘odorless’ (Iwabuchi, 2002) cultural products. On the other hand, museums are site-specific
152
institutions dealing with ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs, 1950) of the nation or of local
communities (Crane, 2000). However, museums also face the need to attract a wider
audience than before. There is ongoing debate on the ‘democratization of museums’
(Moore, 1997) i.e., how they should reach and/or represent the broader ‘public’. This is
where popular culture gets called for, because it is considered a shared memory that people
from different social groups, communities, and nations can relate to. But how exactly does
this function? Can we really assume the transnationality of memories? How do museums
present them? This session observes the meaning of ‘popular culture museums’, and their
construction of transnational memory.
The Postmodern Wax Museum: Memory, Placeness, and Materiality
Mariko Murata, Kansai University, Japan
This presentation focuses on the ‘postmodernity’ of wax museums, where memory,
placeness and materiality transcend the modernity of museums. Wax figures have belonged
to cultures of both raw curiosity (the age of curiosity) and sophisticated science (the age of
enlightenment). Today, however, wax museums are at the heart of popular culture, and one
of the most favoured sites among tourists. While a museum usually deals with ‘real’ objects
connected to the memory of a nation, a community or a place, wax figures as museum
objects are mere copies of famous people ‘materialized’ by moulding and sculpting. Many
sites even share the same internationally known figures as exhibits. Nonetheless people
around the world visit and enjoy taking photographs of/with them. In the presentation, I try
to analyze the cultural meaning of wax museums, the visitors’ experiences, and how their
transnational memories of popular culture are shared, (re)produced or updated on site.
Construction of the ‘public’ memory of the celebrity: Popular culture museum in
Japan
Saeko Ishita, Osaka City University, Japan
In this paper, the popular culture museum is regarded as the site that is constructing the
‘public' memory of celebrity in popular culture. As case studies, some celebrity museums in
Japan are discussed on their backgrounds of establishment, capitals, relationship with
communities, display methods, and fan cultures in detail. Through the analysis, I clarify the
interaction between popular cultures and their fans, the construction of the 'public' memory
of celebrity and the popular culture museum.
Finland as Moominvalley: National Image Constructed in Transnational Memory
Mikako Hata, Hanazono University, Japan
Moominvalley (Tampere Art Museum) and Moominworld are popular destinations for the
Japanese tourists. They visit there to confirm their images of Finland accumulated through
the anime adaptation of the Moomins, which was in fact produced by a Japanese studio. In
this presentation, the relationship between this transnationally constructed memory and the
presence of Moomin-themed museum and park will be discussed. Another point of
consideration will be the similarity to a geek fad in Japan, ‘seichi junrei (anime-induced
tourism)’, which literally means ‘pilgrimage’. Moominvalley and Moominworld might be
holy places for the Japanese Moomin fans, or the places where they can ‘modify’ their image
of Finland.
153
L7 Rethinking the Cultural in Suicide
Chair: Katrina Jaworski, University of South Australia
Suicide is studied more than ever. Suicidology – the dominant field in charge of the study of
suicide – now claims to know why suicide happens, what the signs are likely to be, and how
we can respond so that we can prevent it. In its tenacity to pinpoint the truth about suicide,
suicidology fails to understand the complicated and divergent epistemology of death. This
panel responds critically to suicidology’s hold on suicide by thinking through what the
cultural can mean against claims about suicide as individual, irrational, pathological and
shameful. By addressing sovereign power in the knowing of suicide, the panel demonstrates
a simple yet salient message: we need to rethink the epistemic matrix of power in suicide to
decolonize the very terms which take hold of lives of those who choose death instead of life.
Otherwise, what are we preventing and whom are we saving from death?
Cultural Tensions: Suicide, Sexual Identity and Shame
Rob Cover, The University of Western Australia, Australia
This paper approaches the topic of cultural studies and its capacity to approach and address
issues of gender, sexuality and suicide by interrogating the concept of shame and its
continuing role in queer youth suicidality. Shame has a long history in the cultural
knowledges around both sexuality and suicide. Recent work by a number of theorists has
shifted how shame is understood as an emotion or affect, and how it is implicated in the
formation of the subject. Following this, it is argued here that shame operates to create
‘tensions’ between self and the expectations of significant others, between private desires
and public identification, and between the self and the perception of others through
conceptions of non-normative bodies in public space. Substantially important in
understanding sexuality-related youth suicide is a critique of the gendered formation of
shame. The ways in which shame continues to be implicated in sexuality-related suicide is
opened up through readings of a number of texts on queer youth suicide, including film and
news reports on the high-profile suicide of Tyler Clementi subsequent to his being shamed
by a roommate who recorded his intimate encounter with another man.
Suicide as an Ethical Gift
Katrina Jaworski, University of South Australia
A person suicides. On the one hand, something about their will to die remains distinctly
their own, shrouded by the privacy of the material act of suicide. On the other hand, their
will to die is interpreted as selfish and irrational by those haunted by grief and loss. How do
we respond to this schism? How do we acknowledge the loss of those who grieve without
undermining the agency of those who choose to die? Unfortunately, suicidology does not
offer any help, but philosophy and cultural theory do. Drawing on the work of Jacques
Derrida, Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas, I propose we address this schism by theorising
suicide as a painful ethical gift. I begin by problematising the ontological status of suicide as
an individual act. I then use my critique to develop suicide as an ethical gift as means of
wrestling with its incongruous and deeply cultural nature.
154
An Unclouded View: Compulsory Ontology, Clinical Episteme, and Gendering
Dissidence of Suicide
Marko Stamenkovic, University of Ghent, Belgium
As a point of departure, this paper takes a set of arguments around discourses of suicide as
hegemonic, accumulated around the sovereign domain of scientific knowledge, and in
charge of a compulsory ontology of suicide. The task then is two-fold: first, to scrutinize the
hegemonic episteme by penetrating its dynamics of power; second, to offer alternatives to its
‘regimes of truth’ within the plurality of epistemic models and rationalities. To underline the
extent to which the gendering process occurs therein is tantamount to this task. I argue that
the dominant ontology and epistemology of suicide produce a discursively polluted and
clouded backdrop where pathological and patriarchal principles still prevail. This paper thus
interrogates suicidology across its strands of thought and politics of representation.
Moreover, it introduces unexplored dissident perspectives into an existent counterhegemonic agenda for liberation from the Western scientific epistemicide—the gendering of
suicide being no exception to that.
L8 Negotiating the National within Globalized Media
Culture
Chair: Fan Yang, University of Maryland, United States
Discussant: Sumita Chakravarty, The New School, United States
This panel examines the relationship between globalized media culture and the
(re)production of national imaginaries in contemporary China, Germany and Turkey. The
panelists situate several commercially produced and national-popular media texts — a TV
documentary, a series of reality TV, and a historical film — within the context of
globalization. We suggest that these productions and the discourses they generate serve as
crucial mechanisms for formulating popular responses to global modernity, colonial legacy,
and economic regionalization in our respective national settings. Our critically informed
analyses of these texts and their reception reveal that globalized media genres, styles, and
narrative forms play a significant role in shaping the production and re-articulation of
popular memory and national identity. Popular media, therefore, operate as sites of struggles
wherein issues of the national are continuously re-imagined and re-negotiated, often in ways
that simultaneously affirm and contest the neoliberal world order.
“Afrika, mon amour": Colonial Memory and National Identity in Germany Today
Kaya de Wolf, Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany
Within the last decade, the question of German colonialism and its legacy has gained
growing public attention. While public memory of colonialism in present-day Germany is
mostly characterized in terms of “colonial amnesia”, numerous productions in popular
culture show that memories of Germany’s colonial past are indeed available, being publicly
(re)mediated in various ways at present.
This paper examines the ways in which colonial memory is being negotiated in the
contemporary public media discourse in Germany. By drawing on recent controversies
about the popular television film Afrika, mon amour and the reality show Wild Girls – On
High Heels through Africa the paper illustrates that collective memory of German
155
colonialism has become a contested field. I argue that popular media culture represents a
central site of these current struggles about colonial memory which challenge hegemonic
narratives about the national past and present.
A Bite of China, A Bite of the Heart: Food, Globalization, and the Negotiation of
National Difference
Fan Yang, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, United States
On May 14th, 2012, China Central Television (CCTV) began airing A Bite of China, a 7episode documentary that showcases a wide array of food cultures in contemporary China.
Despite its late-night showing, the series quickly became one of the hottest trending topics
on the Chinese Internet. While some are drawn to its ingenious blending of history,
geography, and human stories, others celebrate it as an embodiment of a new kind of “soft
power with Chinese characteristics.” This paper does a symptomatic reading of the
documentary to analyze the negotiation of national identity amid the myriad forces of global
modernity. I argue that while the series relies on a globalized and depoliticized narrative to
project a market-friendly “Chineseness,” its visual emphasis on the not-yet-industrialized
mode of food production opens up the possibility to re-imagine the national as a site of
hegemonic struggle over and against the global system.
The Conquest of Istanbul: Re-articulating Turkish Identity through National
Cinema
Chien Yang Erdem, Bilkent University, Turkey
The Conquest 1453 (Fetih 1453), the highest-profile film ever produced in Turkey, has
generated enthusiasm and resentment among both domestic and foreign viewers. While
some praise the advanced quality of the film’s production and its sincere representation of a
glorious past, others consider it as a commercial commodity at the expense of historical
work and an offence towards the Christian community. This paper examines the role of this
historical film, whose narrative aligns with the Islamist discourse of the conquest, in the
production of a neo-Ottoman imaginary as a counter-hegemonic force against state-imposed
and global modernity. I contend that the film serves as a mechanism for popularizing
Ottoman history as an alternative narrative, one that recognizes the conquest of Istanbul as
the foundation of the Turkish nation as it mediates the ruling Justice and Development
Party’s neo-Ottoman vision, which projects Turkey as a pivotal regional power and global
player.
L9 Communicating humanitarianism II: Imageries of
solidarity and suffering
Chair: Camilla Haavisto, University of Helsinki, Finland
The emergence of new communication technologies in northern and southern societies has
reshaped media environments and cultural space profoundly. Mediated experiences travel in
space and time faster than before, and spaces for collective emotions have increased and are
no longer nationally bound. Media technological development offers new transnational
ways of participation with new spaces for construction of communities, identities and shared
experiences. Further on, the notions of monitorial citizenship and clictivism point to new
156
forms of social engagement and citizenship that seem to increase visibility of activism and
yet decrease the scale of commitment. However, these changes are not necessarily as
straight forward and simple as some technology-oriented research suggest. Contrarily, it
seems that humanitarianism is challenged in multiple ways, both inside and outside: within
the aid organizations as discontent towards the concept of universal ethics and within
societies at large as a trend towards increased individualization and a commercialization of
distant suffering. Within this framework, we wish to attract papers that offer new insight on
the ways in which aid organizations, journalists, film and television producers, local
governments, citizens and political groups use the media to discuss issues of
humanitarianism. We encourage work that critically explores the area of humanitarianism in
the transforming mediascape.
Resurrecting grief: bearing witness to death as an inversion of bare life
Tal Morse, London School of Economics and Political Science, Israel
The paper addresses moral demand of witnessing humanitarian disaster and its potential to
cultivate cosmopolitan solidarity. The paper explores the coverage of the 2010 Haiti
Earthquake by transnational media and the moral demand they posed to their Western
spectators. An analysis of the various tropes employed to account for the mass death shows
how such overage construes what the author defines as resurrecting grief, which is the
product of death-related media ritual that endows “life” (bios) to those who live bare life.
The analysis identifies two contradicting modes of mediating mass death – dehumanization
of the dead animation of the dead. The paper argues that their bundling together makes the
ethical demand to mobilize global aid for those worthy to be rescued but cannot do it alone.
Such media performance renews the commitment of the western spectators to the distant
sufferer and can serve the construction of cosmopolitan community.
Routes through 'other spaces' in Colombian documentaries of the armed conflict
Maria Luna, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Colombia
The opening of 'other space' of the armed conflict is built as a travel through the emotions
and distances between the urban gaze of the documentary filmmakers in contrast to the rural
characters and the subjects of the armed conflict documentaries. This paper explores the
articulation between aesthetic and ethic selections in Colombian armed conflict
documentaries filmed between 2002 and 2010, during democratic security policy, a period
in which spatial restrictions to civil population in rural zones increased. This proposal
revolves around ideas of the opening of an “ethical space in documentary” (Sobchack,
1984; Nichols, 1991) and proposes a model of analysis for documentary films focused on
the concept of heterotopia (Foucault, 1987), understood from the ideas of the production of
space(Lefebvre, 1974). The findings show different approaches to other spaces from different
types of documentaries: author, activists or commissioned and finally they interrogate the
trend of hybrid poetics in documentary.
Challenging humanitarian communication - an exploration of Kony 2012
Johannes von Engelhardt, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands &
Jeroen Jansz, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
In March 2012, American NGO InvisibleChildren released an online video about crimes
committed by Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. No longer
primarily based on moral universalism, the depoliticized calls for action in post-
157
humanitarian appeals such as Kony2012 tap into the spectator’s need for moral selfactualization and showcase the ‘crisis of pity’ that humanitarian organizations are facing
today. Empirically based on an online survey, this study offers an exploration of Kony2012
from an audience perspective. Results suggest that the video’s narrative created a sense of
personal moral responsibility, which appears to have been eased by the communitarian
celebration of a Western ‘us’ in the video’s second half. While much criticism was voiced in
public debate about the representation of an African crisis in Kony2012, analysis suggest
that on an individual level, a critical stance did not mitigated the sense of personal
responsibility to act in audiences.
Filming Hospitality: New humanitarianism, film production and the case of Il
Volo by Wim Wenders
Kaarina Nikunen, University of Tampere, Finland
Southern Italy is estimated to receive 10,000–30,000 immigrants from Africa and the Middle
East each year. The conditions of the arriving immigrants are poor, and the resources to take
care of them are modest. Several independent filmmakers have strived to capture these
impossible situations. This paper discusses one of these films, Il Volo by Wim Wenders
(2010). Filmed in the location of Calabria, Il Volo narrates the story of hospitality and
humanity in two local villages.
By bringing together concepts of new humanitarianism and affective economy the
paper examines how particular notions of humanity and hospitality enter the production and
the ways in which they become negotiated (and contested) in the process. While the paper
agrees that it is important to expand humanitarian imagery by including novel economic
solutions for cultural production, it points out the problems that arise as humanitarianism
becomes connected with economic value.
L10 European Journal of Cultural Studies roundtable:
The challenge of the social media
Chair: Pertti Alasuutari, University of Tampere, Finland
Panelists:
Ann Gray, University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Joke Hermes, Inholland University, The Netherlands
Pertti Alasuutari, University of Tampere, Finland
Mila Steele, Sage Publications
158