Abstract

'Lilie Chouliaraki grounds her sophisticated arguments in meticulous research. The result is a work of important scholarship that might even make us think about the world and its mediation in profoundly new ways' - Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media and Communications, The London School of Economics and Political Science. Tsunami, famine, terrorist outrage, hurricane, earthquake every day we are confronted by the suffering of distant others, but how are we supposed to feel? How are we meant to react? This book addresses a topic of urgent and pressing moral concern: the political, cultural and moral effects of other people's mediated suffering. Drawing on media and social theory, political philosophy and discourse analysis, the book offers an original theoretical perspective on the role of media in global civil society, and looks at how we might begin to analyse the ways in which distant suffering is portrayed, reproduced and consumed.