Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). Chouliaraki’s main area of research is the mediation of human vulnerability and suffering. Her publications have pioneered an interdisciplinary research field in Media and Communications Ethics, focusing on three areas of research:
Media Representations and Vulnerable Populations in the Global South: How media portrayals influence Western moral and political relationships with vulnerable populations in the Global South, shaping perceptions and responses to their circumstances. Pain, Power, and Global Hierarchies: How expressions of pain intersect with global power structures, affecting the way Western audience perceives and responds to the suffering of distant others. Weaponization of Human Suffering: How human suffering is manipulated and exploited by political actors for their own agendas.
Her research examines case studies on disaster news, humanitarian and human rights communication, migration as well as war and conflict journalism, approaching these in a historical perspective and across mass media and digital platforms. This research has been published in her trilogy of books on human vulnerability as a problem of communication: The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006/2011), The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (2013) and The Digital Border. Migration, Technology, Power (2022, with Myria Georgiou).
Chouliaraki's research has expanded to include the history and politics of victimhood, particularly within the context of emotional capitalism, social media platforms, and far-right populism. This research cycle culminated in a trilogy of books, the first of which, appeared as Wronged. The Weaponization of Victimhood (Columbia University Press, 2024) received the Outstanding Book Award from the International Communication Association (ICA).
Building on the arguments developed in the book, the author also contributed to The Guardian, where they analyzed how populist narratives around Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy reshape public debates on victimhood and military aid.
Education and Career Chouliaraki has a background in Languages and Linguistics, having completed both her MA and PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University and her BA (Ptycheion) at the University of Athens. While her specialization is in Critical Linguistics and Discourse Theory and Analysis, Chouliaraki’s work has a strong interdisciplinary orientation, drawing on Social and Cultural Theory, Moral Philosophy and Sociology, Visual Communication and Social Semiotics.
From 1997 to 2003, Chouliaraki worked as a post-doc, Assistant and Associate Professor at the Departments of Philology, and of Film and Media, University of Copenhagen. In 2004, she joined the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), becoming Professor of Media and Discourse Studies in 2006. A year later, she moved to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) as Chair in Media and Communication, where she remains today.
Chouliaraki maintains an Honorary Professorship at the Copenhagen Business School and has held visiting professorships at several universities, including CELSA-Sorbonne, Paris, University of Helsinki, Stockholm University, The New School of Social Research, Yale University and New York University. She also held a Professorial Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna in 2017. Her work has been translated in Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Greek, Italian, French, Chinese and is currently being translated in Korean. Chouliaraki's work has received funding from the Greek, Danish, Nordic and Dutch Research Councils. In 2020, Chouliaraki was announced as an ICA Fellow, in recognition of her distinguished scholarly contributions to the field of Media and Communications.
She serves on the editorial board of numerous international journals, including the International Journal of Communication, Discourse and Society; Visual Communication; Social Semiotics; Critical Discourse Studies; Crime, Media, Culture; Journal of Language and Politics, JOMEC Journal, Popular Communication, Digital Journalism.
In addition to numerous academic keynote lectures worldwide, Chouliaraki has also lectured for major NGOs, such as Amnesty International (UK, Finland) and Doctors without Borders (Netherlands) on the development of their communication agendas and strategies. She was also a judge at The Guardian’s International Development Competition, 2012 and 2013.
In 2014, in Media Ethics & Humanitarianism, Chouliaraki discussed 'the moral implications of the use of celebrities by humanitarian organisations' in the LSE’s YouTube video debates ‘Gearty Grillings’ with Prof. Conor Gearty. Her 2024 book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood is discussed, among others, in the podcast on "Borderless Voices with Dr. Ayesha Jehangir" and in a video presentation available in the LSE's Youtube Research Video Series. The book has been also reviewed in The Atlantic When Victimhood Takes a Bad-Faith Turn.
Victimhood in the Public Sphere Chouliaraki's current research focuses on the concept of victimhood and its role in the political sphere and culture wars in Western public spheres. She examines the historical and contemporary conditions under which vulnerability, a social state of openness to violence, transforms into victimhood, a form of communication that bestows the moral value of the vulnerable upon those who claim it.
Through this distinction Chouliaraki emphasizes that claiming to be a victim doesn't necessarily mean someone is actually vulnerable or oppressed and proposes that we differentiate between victimhood as “performative speech act” and vulnerability as “structural condition”. This distinction reveals the political motivations behind claims of victimhood and encourages a deeper understanding of the social context and power dynamics at play. For instance, the far Right often uses a tactical weaponization of victimhood, where it appropriates claims to pain and constructs narratives of injustice to mobilize support and further its political agenda. In this way, the far Right exploits the power of emotional appeals, most often found on social media platforms, to create communities of identification based on shared grievances.
Chouliaraki highlights the significance of examining the historical and structural context in which claims of victimhood are made, to understand the relative vulnerabilities and privileges of those claiming victim status. This intersection, Chouliaraki argues, is crucial in understanding the contemporary culture wars played out in the public spheres of western and non-western contexts. Her concept of victimhood as a speech act highlights precisely that individuals who choose to articulate their suffering in the public sphere do not all have the same status or power and so some claims – those of the most powerful- tend to be not only more tactical but also more visible and dominant than others.
The act of claiming victimhood can have both political and normative implications.
Political implications: Claims of victimhood can be used to gain power, garner sympathy, or justify certain actions. Normative implications: The act of claiming victimhood can shape societal norms and values. It can influence who is deemed worthy of empathy and protection, as well as how society perceives certain issues or events. Both political and normative implications can therefore legitimize existing social orders and sustain hierarchies of pain and suffering.
Platformization of Pain Today victimhood is thoroughly “platfrormized.” This means that the circulation and amplification of claims to pain is regulated by the commercial logic of social media platforms. And platforms tend to maximize the visibility of those claims that work best in their economy of attention - especially those framed by extreme emotion, outrage and hate speech. While platforms can also provide marginalized groups with the means to speak out, for instance in the case of #MeToo or #BLM, they mostly tend to amplify the claims of the already powerful, and, in this way, they “decide” who is seen and validated as a “victim” and whose suffering is deemed worthy of attention.
By selectively amplifying certain claims and silencing others, social media platforms contribute to the construction of social order and hierarchies of human lives. Chouliaraki argues that we need to deepen our critique of the political economy of platforms both by advancing evidence-driven reforms in platform regulation and by questioning the whole profit-driven architecture of platforms and working towards alternative business models oriented towards the public interest and less oriented towards private profit.
Reclaiming Victimhood It's crucial to understand that victimhood isn't just about personal suffering; it's a political tool that can be used to reinforce existing power structures. Therefore, when confronted with claims of victimhood, Chouliaraki invites to critically analyze the situation, consider the power dynamics at play, and ask ourselves: Who is truly being harmed? Whose voices are being silenced? Only by understanding the broader context can we fully grasp the complexities of victimhood and begin the work of reclaiming it.
To achieve this, Chouliaraki advocates a cultural shift in our focus from individual and commodified experiences of pain – “my” pain, “my trauma”, which are rampant on social media - to collective narratives that contextualize pain in its political contexts, link it to systemic forms of inequalities and put forward the demand for redemption and justice especially for the most vulnerable.
Mediation of Suffering
Disaster News and the Hierarchies of Place and Human Life In The Spectatorship of Suffering, Chouliaraki explores the relationship between western spectators and vulnerable “others” in contexts of disaster, oppression and war on their news screens. Chouliaraki’s book was one of the first systematic studies in the field of Media and Communication that demonstrated how the use of language and image in Western national and trans-national television networks tell news stories that invite different degrees of moral and emotional identification with those others, depending on who they are and where they come from, and, in this way, perpetuate hierarchical patterns of place and human life along a West/non-West axis.
In chapter 4 of this book, Chouliaraki proposes a Discourse Analytic methodology, the "Analytics of Mediation", that explores three key dimensions of news texts – language-image correspondence, space-time and agency - in terms of how each participates in the representation of the scene of disaster and suffering and how each contributes to creating global hierarchies of places and human life.
Generally speaking, Chouliaraki’s work applies and advances text-based, interpretive methodologies in social research, meaning that she problematizes representations not via top-down normative argumentation but through systematic discourse and semiotic analysis of distinct configurations of text and context. Her own method for the study of media representations, the analytics of mediation, views mediation as both a semiotic achievement (as a text) and a social technology-rooted inside existing power relations. In this way, the analytics of mediation aims to preserve the modernist heritage of normative research, social criticism and change, and, at the same time, to support the mission of a bottom-up, case-by-case critical interpretation of specific communicative events.