Professor Lilie Chouliaraki

• In 2025, Prof Chouliaraki's book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood. Columbia University Press was awarded the Outstanding Book of the Year by the International Communication Association (ICA) and the Best Book Award of the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division, ICA.
• In 2023, Prof. Chouliaraki’s co-authored article Beyond verification: flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news. Journalism, 23 (3). 649 – 667 was awarded an Honorable Mention of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.
• In 2020, Prof Chouilaraki was awarded an ICA Fellowshipfrom the International Communication Association (ICA) in recognition of her distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication.
• In 2015, Prof Chouliaraki's book The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism was awarded Outstanding Book of the Year by the Interntional Communication Association (ICA).
• In 2012, Prof Chouliaraki's article Re-mediation, Inter-mediation, Trans-mediation was awarded Outstanding Paper of the Year in the ICA Journalism Studies Division.
• In 2010, Prof Chouliaraki's article Ordinary Witnessing in Post-Television News: Towards a new moral imagination was awarded Top Paper of the Year in the ICA Journalism Studies Division.

Professor Chouliaraki's main research focus lies in the mediation of human vulnerability, and she has spent the past two decades exploring four key domains within which human vulnerability appears as a problem of communication: disaster news, humanitarianism, migration and war. In her work on the mediation of disaster news, Professor Chouliaraki has shown the ways in which Western national and trans-national television networks follow hierarchical patterns in their narrative organisation of news on distant suffering and, hence, in the systematic distribution of ethical sensibilities towards distant others. In so doing, she concluded, they reproduce global hierarchies of place and human life, along a West/non-West axis (The Spectatorship of Suffering, Sage, 2006/2011).

In subsequent work, Prof. Chouliaraki focuses on humanitarian and human rights communication, exploring how the mediation of solidarity has changed in the course of the past fifty years. Looking into NGO appeals, rock concerts, celebrity advocacy and post-television disaster news, she demonstrates how major institutional (the commercialisation of the aid and development field), technological (the rise of new media) and political (the fall of grand narratives) transformations have also changed the moral imperative to act on distant others in need. As a consequence, she argues, solidarity has today become not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves - turning us into the ironic spectators of other people's suffering (The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism, Polity, 2012). She has also coedited a state-of-the art collection on the present challenges and directions of the field, theRoutledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication(with Anne Vestergaard, Routledge, 2021).

More recently, Professor Chouliaraki's work has turned to the communication of migration. Together with Prof. Myria Georgiou, she draws on multi-method research on the biggest migration event of the 21st century in the west - the 2015 migration "crisis" and its aftermath up to 2020 - to unpack the complexity and contradictions of the border in the age of datafication. In their book The Digital Border. Migration, Technology, Power(New York University Press, 2022), Chouliaraki and Georgiou develop a holistic theory of the digital border as an assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. The digital border that emerges in their study, they argue, is neither fully digital nor totally controlling. Rather, it is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; and traversed by fragile social relationships that entail both the despair or inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

Prof. Chouliaraki’s current work encompasses a study of the digital witnessing of war through smartphone devices or on social media platforms such as You Tube (published in Popular Communication, Information, Communication and Society; Visual Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Media War and Conflict; and more recently with Dr Omar al-Ghazzi, in Journalism).At the same time, Prof. Chouliaraki critical study of the histories and current uses of "victimhood" in the cultural politics of the Anglo-American world has just been published as Wronged. The Weaponization of Victimhood by Columbia University Press. Listen to a podcast with Prof Chouliaraki for Borderless Voices with Dr Ayesha Jehangir, where she discusses the main themes of her book.

An overarching interest in Prof. Chouliaraki’s work is Discourse Theory and Analysis. She has written on discourse as a theoretical approach and as a methodological tool is her book Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis(co-authored with Norman Fairclough, Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and in numerous publications (Social Semiotics, Journal of Management Studies; Linguistics and Education, Critical Discourse Studies; The Handbook of Cultural Analysis).

Postgraduate teaching

Professor Chouliaraki convenes the MC501. Advanced Doctoral Seminarsfor 3^rdand 4^th- year PhD students and contributes to the postgraduate course MC429. Humanitarian Communication as well as to the team-taught postgraduate Media and Communications courses relating to Discourse and Multi-Modal research methodologies (MC4M1/MC4M2).

Doctoral supervision

Professor Chouliaraki supervises doctoral students whose topics include the use of AI (museum holograms) in the transmission of Holocaust testimonies; the mobilization of male victimhood in online misogynist activism; techno-orientalist representations of AI in popular fiction; the institutional restructuring of photojournalism in the digital newsroom.

Applicants with backgrounds in social science disciplines including media and cultural studies, communication and discourse studies, political science, sociology and gender studies are encouraged to apply.

Professor Chouliaraki's current doctoral supervisees are Gal Ravia, Sindhoora Pemmaraju, Hatty Liu and Lewis Bush.

• Professor Lilie Chouliaraki discusses her award-winning book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood (Columbia University Press, 2024) with Prof. Roland Bleiker and Cormac Opdebeeck-Wilson at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. Watch here.
• Professor Lilie Chouliaraki discusses the moral implications of the use of celebrities by humanitarian organisations, part of her award-winning book The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Polity, 2013) with Prof. Conor Gearty, LSE. Watch here.