Dialogues in Journalism Studies: An 'Affective Turn'?

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel opens up a dialogue about how research on emotion in journalism can advance the field. Historically, emotion has been considered a “bad object” in journalism practice and scholarship. Normative approaches have leaned on a liberal democratic framework, which has understood emotion as the enemy of rational citizenship. Journalism, particularly in most Western democracies, has therefore been shaped by the allegiance to the ideal of objectivity, which valorizes dispassionate, impartial, disembodied and fact-centered discursive practices. Nonetheless, there has been a recent turn to questions of affect and emotion in journalism - both in terms of practices of journalistic storytelling and in examining the emotional labour of journalists themselves. This is reflected in the interest in practices of “subjective journalism” (Coward, 2013) and the “strategic ritual of emotionality” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013). The growing recognition of the importance of emotion in journalism (Pantti, 2010) should also be understood in the light of a broader “affective turn” across humanities and social sciences (Clough and Halley, 2007) and the alleged rise of a “therapy culture” in which the discussion of emotion in public is increasingly valued.

In journalism scholarship, such preoccupations have been taken up in the context of changing technologies which increasingly facilitate new forms of “citizen witnessing”, which allow amateurs to produce accounts of human suffering that may challenge established mainstream media accounts (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2015; Papacharissi, 2014). Further, journalism operates within an increasingly globalised media ecosystem, where the cultivation of solidarity across boundaries of difference informs the practices of journalists covering crises.

This theme is central to the scholars gathered on this panel, as they explore how emotion circulates through journalistic discourses. Hanusch develops a typology of emotion in visual imagery through his examination of images of the Haiti Earthquake. For Wahl-Jorgensen and Chouliaraki, the journalistic construction of emotion is crucially entwined with power relations. Wahl-Jorgensen examines representations of anger in protest, arguing that anger is understood as a political resource, but also one which is resisted and subverted by protesters, while Chouliaraki suggests that recent coverage of the migration crisis legitimises a posture of minimal responsibility towards the migrants. Finally, Pantti examines journalists’ use of Twitter as a tool for managing and narrating their own emotions in the context of covering the Ukrainian crisis.

Through these presentations, the panel develops approaches which take seriously the emotional life of journalism and may shape research agendas, methods and theoretical approaches.

Sub Unit

• Journalism Studies

Chair

• C.W. Anderson, College of Staten Island- CUNY

Individual Presentations

• Visualizing emotions in disaster coverage: A comparative approach - Folker Christian Hanusch, Queensland U of Technology

• Anger as a political emotion in media coverage of protest - Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff U - JOMEC

• The necropolitics of affect: Imageries of 'arriving' refugees' in European press - Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Twitter as working-through: frontline journalists’ affective management of information war - Mervi Pantti, U of Helsinki

Respondent

• Zizi A. Papacharissi, U of Illinois - Chicago