Changing Cultures of Witnessing: paintings, selfies, hashtags [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Professor Barbie Zelizer | What do #MeToo, refugee selfies and oil paintings have in common? They are all part of a mixed and changing culture of witnessing. This interdisciplinary panel explores the different media platforms and practices of spectatorship that today enable our moral and political engagement with human vulnerability. It asks not only how the digital has shifted the terms of our visual encounters with bodies-in-pain but also shows how our testimonial cultures remain the same. This is not only because contemporary witnessing mixes media, old and new, but crucially also because it is still traversed by historical power relations and social hierarchies. Lilie Chouliaraki (@chouliaraki_l) is a Professor of Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Robin Wagner-Pacifici is the University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Barbie Z