[4] 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.
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.
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.
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.
[3] In The Spectatorship of Suffering,[2] 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.
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.
In this award-winning book,[11] she examines how, in the past half century, western NGO and INGO actors have radically changed the ways they represent the suffering of vulnerable “others” as a cause for solidarity.
Looking into Amnesty International and Oxfam campaigns, charity concerts like Live Aid and Live 8, the celebrity advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie, and the BBC’s digital blog on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Chouliaraki identifies those transformations as institutional (the commercialisation of the aid and development field), technological (the rise of social media platforms) and political (the fall of ideological narratives and the rise of individualism), and shows in detail how these transformations have shifted the ethical message of humanitarian communications from “doing good to others” to “feeling good in ourselves”.
[1] Chouliaraki has taken this work further in her more recent, coedited collection of state-of-the-art studies on the current challenges and future directions of the field, titled The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication[12] (with Anne Vestergaard, 2021).
On the basis of this wealth of data, Chouliaraki contributed to a conceptualization of the border no longer as a fixed geographical line on the ground but as a complex, multi-material formation defined by its technological, institutional, human and discursive networks of mediation.
These networks work to legitimize discourses of humanitarian or entrepreneurial securitization that contribute to the exclusion and marginalization of the vulnerable populations of migrants and refugees.
New Media, Citizenship and Civic Selves[17] (2012), The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism[1] (2013), The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication[12] (2022), The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power[4] (2022) and Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood (2024).