We're pleased to be welcoming Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics, to give this term's CCPS Research Seminar. Professor Chouliaraki will give a talk entitled 'Post-humanitarianism: the contemporary politics of solidarity', drawing from her recent book The Ironic Spectator (Polity, 2013). More details and a bio are below.

The seminar will start at 5pm and be held in G50 of Millburn House. Refreshments will be provided. Please e-mail Paula Watkins on p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk if you'd like to attend.

'Post-humanitarianism. The contemporary politics of solidarity'

In this lecture, I discuss historical change in the communication of solidarity within the humanitarian and human rights fields. To this end, I present a typology of iconographies of solidarity, dominant in the past 50 years, and focus, in particular, on a new iconographical proposal, what I call a 'post-humanitarian' proposal, which tends to focus on 'us' rather than distant sufferers as the moral source of action on their suffering. Drawing on specific examples of this emerging iconography, I explore its key features and reflect on its moral and political implications.

Bio

 Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She has written extensively on distant suffering as a problem of communication and is the author of, among others, The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006/2011); The Soft Power of War (ed, 2008) and The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (2013; Nominated for the Outstanding Book Award in the International Communications Association).

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/whosWho/AcademicStaff/LilieChouliaraki.aspx

The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism, 2013, Cambridge: Polity

http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745642116