Media, Mobilization, and Human Rights: Mediating Suffering - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780320671 ISBN 13: 9781780320670

Publisher: Zed Books, 2012

Synopsis

What impact do mass media portrayals of atrocities have on activism? Media, Mobilization and Human Rights challenges the assumption that exposure to human rights violations in countries far away causes people to respond with activism to end atrocities. Turning a critical eye on existing scholarship, the authors argue that the reality is complex, and that there is nothing inherently positive or negative about exposure to the suffering of others. In exploring this, the book offers an array of case studies and examines a variety of media forms - from television and radio through to social networking – to present radical new ways of thinking about the intersection of media portrayals of human suffering and activist responses to them.

About this title

About the Author:

Tristan Anne Borer (BA, University of Texas at San Antonio; PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College in New London, CT. She is the author of Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980-1994 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), the editor of Telling the Truths: Truth-Telling and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Societies (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and the co-author (with John Darby and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy) of Peacebuilding After Peace Accords: The Challenges of Violence, Truth and Youth (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). She has also published several articles in the field of human rights in journals including Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, Violence Against Women, African Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Church and State. Her research has been funded by the Joan Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the United States Institute of Peace.

Review:

'In a global media age communications are pivotal in the mobilization of human rights around the world, especially when denied in atrocious acts of inhumanity. This timely, insightful book throws a critical spotlight on mediated suffering, its power and performance.' Professor Simon Cottle, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University 'Tristan Anne Borer has done a great service for both academics and activists by summarizing research on the world's "failure to act" in the face of human rights atrocities. Case studies serve to illuminate when inaction has been a news production or an audience reception problem, and point out not only immensely valuable lessons for educators and NGOs, but needed arenas for future study.' Professor Susan Moeller, Philip Merrill School of Journalism 'This is the book that scholars in the humanities and human rights have been waiting for. Together, its contributors push perennial questions about the relationship between violence and the image, between seeing and acting, and between the aspirations and the limits of cosmopolitanism to new levels of understanding. Theoretically sophisticated and historically substantial, the eminently readable essays in this volume employ impeccable close readings and analysis, case studies, and empirical evidence to advance powerful conclusions regarding the role of the media and cultural texts in struggles for recognition of global suffering and, alternatively, for building cultures of human rights.' Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, associate professor, Babson College, Massachusetts

About this edition

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1780320671
• ISBN 13: 9781780320670
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Borer Tristan Anne