Dr Angelos Kissas is a researcher in political communication who has served as Special Adviser for communication to the current President of Greece and as the first ever Head of Social Media at the Presidency of the Hellenic Republic. Prior to this, he was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Angelos is a graduate of the Communication and Media Studies Department of the University of Athens (Greece) and holds an MSc in Politics and Communication and a PhD in Media and Communications from the LSE.

In his research, Angelos has examined the media-related transformations of political parties’ ideology (PhD), the democratic ambivalence of populism in the digital age of deep mediatization (postdoctoral project), as well as the social-mediated/platformized struggle over authentic and algorithmically worthy victims of terrorist (ISIS) and gendered violence (femicide).

During his visit at the LSE, Angelos continues to work on his postdoctoral project-trilogy on digital populism, adding to the first part, which explored Donald Trump’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter charismatic populism (funded by the ERSC as part of his postdoctoral fellowship), a second, which focuses on Lady Gaga’s and Greta Thunberg’s Instagram celebrity ordinary populism, and a third part, which focuses on the YouTube spectacular populism of Covid19 protests. Angelos also works towards bringing these case studies together in a single narrative on digital populism that will form his first book. At the heart of this narrative lies the idea that populist actors, whether professional or amateur, make and share content through digital media to pledge allegiance to a righteous “people” suffering enduring injustice, a victim that urgently needs to be morally and politically vindicated. What do digital performances of victimhood add to our understanding of populism that traditional approaches to people-centric and anti-elite/establishment populist style, ideology, and discourse miss? How do different platforms serve to confront us with people-as-victims that look and feel authentic, rendering them worthy of our attention, and who are they, in the context of mainstream, institutional-party politics but also extra-institutional, everyday politics? Are these multi-modal, inter-medial and trans-national “victimization technologies” amicable or toxic to liberal democracy? These are questions that Angelos’ current research seeks to address.

Angelos is the new Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Visual Political Communication and an active member of the Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association and the Political Communication Division of the International Association of Communication. For his research, he has been awarded grants by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, the Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council.