Lecture – Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood
Thursday 6 March 2025, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm GMT, London, UK
Speakers:
Professor Lilie Chouliaraki
Professor Lilie Chouliaraki
Professor Rosalind Gill
Radha Sarma Hegde
Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Join us for this public event to celebrate the book launch of Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood.
Why is being a victim such a potent identity today? Who claims to be a victim, and why? How have such claims changed in the past century? Who benefits and who loses from the struggles over victimhood in public culture? In this timely and incisive book, Lilie Chouliaraki shows how claiming pain is about claiming power: who deserves to be protected as a victim and who should be punished as a perpetrator. She argues that even if suffering is universal, this “politics of pain” is deeply embedded within power relations and ultimately privileges the voices of the powerful over those of the powerless.
Meet our speakers and chair
Lilie Chouliaraki (@chouliaraki_l) is Professor of Media Communications at LSE. Her main interest lies in understanding how the media shapes our ethical and political relationship to vulnerable others; how claims to pain intersect with power relations to inform the ways we witness vulnerable others and the ways we are invited to feel, think and act towards them.
Rosalind Gill is Professor of Inequalities in Creative and Cultural Industries at Goldsmiths, University of London. Gill has produced groundbreaking work on gender and media; cultural and creative work; and mediated intimacy, and made a significant contribution to debates about the ‘sexualization of culture’. Her many books include Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media and Confidence Culture.
Radha Sarma Hegde is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research and teaching focus on migration, media flows, globalization and transnational feminism. She is the author of Mediating Migration, editor of Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (@KarinWahlJ) is Professor of Journalism, Media and Culture at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, where she serves as University Dean of Research Environment and Culture. She has published 9 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters on journalism and citizenship including, Emotions, Media and Culture.
Myria Georgiou (@MyriaGeorgiou4) is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Professor Georgiou is the author and editor of five books and more than sixty peer reviewed publications. Her work has been published in English, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Greek. She has also worked as a consultant for a number of regional and international organisations, most importantly the Council of Europe in three different projects.
More about this event
This event will be available to watch on LSE Live. LSE Live is the new home for our live streams, allowing you to tune in and join the global debate at LSE, wherever you are in the world. If you can’t attend live, a video will be made available shortly afterwards on LSE’s YouTube channel.
Find more information and book your free place here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2025/03/202503061830/weaponization-of-victimhood
This event will be held at Shaw Library, 6th Floor, Old Building, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, UK.