Distant Suffering Research Articles

Engaging with Distant Suffering Amid a Domestic Crisis: Exposure to Messages About COVID-19 Infections in the Global South Can Trigger Pro-Social Responses in the Global North

ABSTRACT Transnational solidarity is essential during global crises, particularly for resource-deprived countries. This study investigated whether messages about rising COVID−19 infections in the Global South can raise awareness and trigger solidarity among audiences in the Global North during an acute domestic crisis. Moreover, it tested whether the effects depend on the message framing. In two 2 + 1 experiments in the first months of the pandemic, participants from Germany were exposed to messages that informed them about rising infections in India. I found that message exposure made the threat to the population in the Global South more salient, increased empathy with the affected, resulted in a stronger intention to directly help, and tentatively led to more support of a government response. Whether messages framed rising infections as a humanitarian catastrophe for the Indian population or as a threat to the German population due to the increased likelihood of a virus mutation resulted in nuanced differences, yet overall, effects were more similar than expected. The priming of existing beliefs about the Global South, the particular context of a pandemic, the strength of the communicated threat, and study timing are discussed as potential explanations. Overall, the results underline how important it is to continue reporting about regions that seem distant or even peripheral from the perspective of the Global North in times of domestic crisis. The theoretical relevance of the findings beyond the specific historical context is highlighted.

Mediated Fire and Distant Suffering: The Global Spectacle of Australian Bushfires in Nature 2.0

ABSTRACT The present study collected 10,233 tweets from 193 countries regarding the Australian bushfires from June 1, 2019, to May 13, 2020. Based on the theoretical framework of spectacular environmentalism, distant suffering, and construal level theory, this study explores the spectacle of Australian bushfires in the context of nature 2.0. With the help of the STM, four conclusions are found: the Australian bushfires are a global spectacle co-created by media and audience using five different frames; the spectacle of the Australian bushfires is a metaphor for the end of the world; in the process of creating the Australian bushfires spectacle with media, humans’ relationships with animals, others, and nature have been reconstructed; and Web 2.0 technology does not exceed the limitations of time and space as expected. Social, spatial, and temporal distances still affect the construction of environmental spectacles.

Landscapes of Distant Suffering: Interrogating Humanitarian Documentary Film Representation of “Harmful” Cultural Practices

ABSTRACT Although a wide range of media interventions have been at the forefront of global humanitarian campaigns aimed at eradicating cultural body modification practices categorized as “harmful” in global health and development policy, such practices continue to persist. In this article, I single out one such domain of intervention – transnational humanitarian documentaries – to interrogate how they visualize the spatial landscape within which women and girls participate in these practices and the implications of such visualization for interventions aimed at eradicating them. I articulate the landscape as: the body which is the ultimate inescapable place where women and girls must live, and as a geo-spatial location where that body lives. With illustrations from documentary films on one specific “harmful” practice, female genital mutilation, I show how the visual framing of the landscape engenders: a (mis)conception of the harmed body as only a dystopic place, thus foreclosing the utopic dreams that motivate persistence of mutilation as a path to inhabiting (an)other (heterotopic) place; a spatialized hierarchy of coercive paternalistic interventions with counter-productive effects that have not only compromised the efficacy of mediated eradication campaigns, but have, by extension, inadvertently contributed to the very persistence of those “harmful” practices.

Virtual reality and celebrity humanitarianism: Rashida Jones in Lebanon

The paper brings together two segments of contemporary humanitarian practice – celebrity advocacy and virtual reality (VR) – in order to more fully comprehend the relationship between emergent technologies and humanitarian advocacy efforts. Numerous VR documentaries intended to immerse audiences into the full experience of “distant suffering” have been crafted for audiences in the global North. Between 2015 and 2019, the United Nations invested in at least 21 VR documentaries covering crisis situations around the world. VR’s popularity is premised on the promise of bringing spectators and “distant sufferers” together through immersive experiences. Performances of humanitarian advocacy use traditional representational tools of Western humanitarian discourse. This leads to the question whether advocacy efforts using immersive VR flatten real and material differences that exist between sufferers and spectators in safe zones through the “illusion of co-suffering”? To what extent do such experiences risk “improper distance” by translating the irreducible alterity of other lives into familiar terms?

Live-Tweeting and Distant Suffering: Nicholas Kristof as Global Savior

Live-Tweeting and Distant Suffering: Nicholas Kristof as Global Savior

‘Writing’ oneself into tragedy: visual user practices and spectatorship of the Alan Kurdi images on Instagram

Studies into affective publics often involve textual communication. However, emotive communication is increasingly visual. This study zooms in on the representation of the suffering other in seven re-workings of the Alan Kurdi photographs that resonated significantly on Instagram. Chouliaraki’s concept of post-humanitarian solidarity in The Ironic Spectator (2013) is used as a theoretical framework to analyse the content of re-worked images and their post captions. Her concept outlines how distant sufferers tend to be rendered invisible due to the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity. This self-reflexivity gets in the way of solidarity for others unlike us. The study found that, although the sufferer is visually present in almost all re-worked images, the suffering is ‘replaced’ by emotions or political views of the creators. Both Chouliaraki’s ‘distant other’ as well as Markham’s similar other are ways to visually (re)construct the tragedy of Alan Kurdi and the refugee crisis in general. This study adds to this an understanding of how Instagram users, while visually constructing a similar or distant other, also write themselves – often their personal feelings – into such images. Their public, other Instagram users, engages in self-reflexivity by liking such re-workings, aligning with the communicated emotions or political views conveyed. In this way, the platform ‘like feature’ intensifies the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity.

Watching Disaster News Online and Offline: Audiences Experiencing News about Far-away Disasters in a Postbroadcast Society

In a postbroadcast society with both online and offline news media widely available, there are many ways for an audience to (actively) consume news about distant suffering. This focus group study looks into the combined use of broadcast media (television) and a postbroadcast platform (Facebook) for watching disaster news. It is considered that the interactive possibilities offered online to watch and experience the news, combined with watching news on television, could possibly help in fostering a closer relation between a Western audience and the distant suffering. Informed by concepts from social and moral psychology, the findings show not only that personal narratives on social media have the potential to incite a more personal connection between the audience and the distant sufferer but also that this potential was not to be overestimated.

Bearing Witness, Moral Responsibility and Distant Suffering

Media analyses of the aesthetic presentation of news frequently and persuasively demonstrate the skewed ethics of news production, where those in need who are distant and dissimilar are often presented in ways that do not fully humanize their condition. However, it is argued here, they also locate too fully the locus of moral responsibility in the production and presentation of the media text. This article explores the moral demands inherent in two kinds of media presentation: the explicit focus on shock and awe over intimacy; and minimal presentations that substitute bare information (such as statistics or maps) for affective stories. It is argued that in both cases a moral encounter with the other can be motivated despite the news presentation and it is concluded that an excessive emphasis on the role of the news in generating moral responsibility justifies a spectatorish inertia that should be resisted.

“Bring in the Audience!” Exploring an Interdisciplinary Approach to Investigating Audience Reactions to Mediated Distant Suffering

Scholarly work on audience reactions to mediated distant suffering tends to focus on the moral, ethical and/or emotional aspects involved (Höijer 2001; Chouliaraki 2006; Scott 2014) while there is also a bias in foregrounding negative reactions such as denial, skepticism or indifference (Moeller 1999; Seu 2010). Hence, more complex and qualified aspects of audience reception risk staying under-explored in future scholarly work. This article acknowledges the complex nature and identifies a broad range of aspects (psychological, cultural, sociological,…) that can influence people’s attitude towards distant societies and suffering. The objective is to explore different processes and aspects that can be integrated in research on audience reactions to images of distant suffering, from different disciplines within social sciences. Cultural anthropology and sociology of new media are briefly discussed in this regard while social psychology is looked in more closely. An interdisciplinary theoretical basis is quintessential in understanding the audience and its complex relation to distant suffering. In this respect, the presented article responds to the call for more empirical and theoretical audience research in the field of mediated suffering by taking the first step towards interdisciplinary and multi-methodological research (Joye 2013; Ong 2014; Orgad and Seu 2014).

Intersectionality of Ethno-cultural Identities and Construal of Distant Suffering Outgroups

In this paper, we explore how white Catholic men talk about the indirect dilemma of non-intervention for black ethnic outgroups. We illustrate how they mobilise global categorisation (all humanity) and use various forms of denial to deal with their non-involvement. Having analyzed representative fragments of their prejudice avoidance talk, we conclude with some observation about the strategic deployment of categories and denial forms as part of identity management talk. In contrast to quantitative research that oversimplifies the ingroup-outgroup distinction, we show how the status and outgroupness levels of the needy appear to be both flexible and intricate, which depends on the often-ignored intersecting cultural factors, like the respondents’ and victims’ ethnic, racial and religious identities.

Listening to Distant Sufferers: The Kony 2012 Campaign in Uganda and the International Media

We use the mediated debate on the Kony 2012 campaign as a case study to explore whether and how traditional and new media practices enable sufferers of humanitarian conflicts to find a voice and to be listened to in both the local and international news media. Within the context of political voice, we emphasise political voice as a social process that involves not only speaking, but also the right to be listened to and to be engaged in conversation. The empirical material for this study consists of a selection of Ugandan newspapers and social media platforms, as well as a selection of international newspapers. Media texts related to the Kony 2012 campaign during the 2 months following the launch of the campaign were singled out and studied with the help of qualitative claims-making analysis. Our findings show that the voices of northern Ugandan victims were heard and conveyed through personal testimonies of Ugandan bloggers and via privately owned local news media. Despite Ugandan victims being temporarily listened to internationally during a short-term Kony 2012 ‘hype’, today, there is not much space for alternative reporting that would make voices of present-day victims in the Central African Republic of Congo or the Democratic Republic of Congo heard.

Cruel to care? Investigating the governance of compassion in the humanitarian imaginary

Compassion is a key moral emotion of liberal modernity. Traditionally, it is seen as an unproblematic moral compass, both theoretically and ethico-politically. This applies especially in the case of humanitarian action, which hinges on the compassionate impulses of individuals – to care, to give and to act – in the face of distant suffering. The article takes a critical approach to compassion. It argues that humanitarian action is incomprehensible outside of a general theory of how compassion structures the encounter between the suffering object of relief and the caring public. It does this by elaborating a pragmatist and eclectic approach to compassion in which seemingly internal affective responses have a socio-political existence and are already enabled by productive power, in particular by socially circulated and embodied narrative frames. By engaging a representative sample of NGO imagery related to the 2010 post-earthquake response in Haiti, the article illustrates not only how specific narrative frames seek to both elicit and govern the ways of feeling compassion, but also how these aesthetic and emotional practices are ethico-politically problematic in portraying distant sufferers and facilitating action. As a result, the benevolent self-image of compassion becomes circumspect. The article concludes by exploring two alternative avenues for compassion and caring.

“Witnessing” or “Mediating” Distant Suffering? Ethical Questions across Moments of Text, Production, and Reception

This article identifies that the current literature on “distant suffering” lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about “media witnessing” have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the “witness” it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific “moments” of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media.

Consumption that matters

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of a rising mode of ethical consumption by exploring the brand concept (RED) and its intertwinement of commerce and charity. Based on an analysis of central online media texts, we focus on: 1) the campaign’s “cool” visual and verbal structures of appeal, and 2) the discursive struggle concerning the ethical potential of consumption motivated by the campaign. The analysis is followed by a discussion of the potential and problems of (RED) as a way of handling global responsibility for distant suffering others. We argue that from a perspective focusing on the representation of the distant sufferer, (RED) can be criticised for transforming suffering into aesthetic spectacles in order to legitimise hedonistic consumption. The potential of the campaign is that it acknowledges that effective ethical ways of relating to distant others will have to be integrated into the narratives of self and community circulating in a given context.

Imagining Ourselves Beyond the Nation? Exploring Cosmopolitanism in Relation to Media Coverage of Distant Suffering

AbstractMajor humanitarian crises and disasters broadcasted around the world are often accompanied by an upsurge of global reactions and outpouring of aid pledges. As such, they become symbolic of a ‘global community’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. The present paper examines this kind of cosmopolitanism and the role of the media in its construction, providing an empirical dimension to a hitherto largely theoretical discussion. Drawing upon focus group discussions with audience members in Greece, the paper will explore how media disasters are being experienced by audiences and the ways this experience is implicated in their perceptions of the world and their place in it. Focusing on the constant interplay between cosmopolitan and national discourses in participants' responses, it will be argued that cosmopolitanism and nationalism cannot be sharply juxtaposed, but cosmopolitanism is often framed through the national.

The hierarchy of global suffering

: In 2007 nearly 17,000 people died because of natural disasters and more than 211 million others were directly affected. News media play a basic role in giving publicity to these numerous instances of global suffering as it is mainly through media reports that the world perceives international crises. Drawing upon theories on distant suffering (cf. Boltanski 1999), this study investigates the mediated representation of international crises, with a focus on natural disasters occurring in Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan and the USA. Applying critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992; Chouliaraki 2006), this article explores how discourses of hierarchy and inequality are realised in news texts about distant suffering. The cases of analysis are nine news items that were broadcast on a public and a commercial Belgian television channel on 2 January 2006. The comparative analysis of these news texts reveals glaring differences that reflect global hierarchies of place and human life. Suffering in the West (USA and Australia) was portrayed as comprehensible and close to the spectator, who could identify with the distant sufferers as if they are like us. While being of a greater magnitude, the Indonesian disaster was in contrast presented as no cause for concern or action, which blocked the engagement with the distant sufferers who were portrayed as ‘Others’, with a capital ‘o’. Pakistan sufferers were also articulated as distant others, but close-ups of gazing children urged the spectator to care for them and potentially act on the represented misfortune. In general, the critical discourse analysis supports the claim that Western news media reproduce a certain kind of global hierarchy, mainly a Euro-American-centred world order, and that news discourse normalises inequalities. This article argues that mediated representations of international crises reflect and consolidate the power relations and divisions that characterise our contemporary world.

Why the message should matter

: There is currently a need to re-analyse the notion of ethical obligation in an increasingly globalised world. This article addresses the issue of moral obligation towards a distant stranger in distress in the context of international crises, and the role of both journalists and media consumers in fulfilling that obligation. Despite an inherent assumption that one should always do ‘good’, it is quite difficult to define what this means in the face of millions of distant sufferers during a humanitarian crisis, for whom distance, time and resources pose significant barriers to aid. In order to highlight the tensions found in the arguments surrounding global ethical obligations, and the real-world obstacles to both reporting such events and performing moral acts, this article addresses the extreme case of genocide and mass killings in international conflict zones. The article explores this question in three parts. First, the key philosophical arguments regarding ethics and our relationship with a distant other are outlined. Roger Silverstone's (2007) concept of the mediapolis is used to incorporate the role of both the media and the media audience in recognising and acknowledging the distant other. These ideas are then expanded to the case of global humanitarian crises and distant others in distress. The second section narrows the topic, addressing obligation on an individual level, as a member of the media audience, and explores why we do not always perform in an ethical manner. This question is analysed by incorporating behaviour prediction models from the fields of economics and psychology into a discussion of ethical behaviour. Finally, returning to the production side of media, the article begins to outline a framework for print journalists covering international crises to present information in such a way that recognises how the media audience reads and internalises information, and thus promotes moral action from the public by altering the weighting of preferential action that would be predicted by rational choice theory and the theory of planned behaviour.

Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians

abstract Duties of beneficence are not well understood. Peter Singer has argued that the scope of beneficence should not be restricted to those who are, in some sense, near us. According to Singer, refusing to contribute to humanitarian relief efforts is just as wrong as refusing to rescue a child drowning before you. Most people do not seem convinced by Singer's arguments, yet no one has offered a plausible justification for restricting the scope of beneficence that doesn't produce counterintuitive results elsewhere. I offer a defence of this restricted scope by introducing the notion of unique dependence, a notion that is both intuitively attractive and theoretically grounded. It explains why your reason to rescue the drowning child is more stringent than your reason to contribute to humanitarian relief, while blocking the conclusion that we have no reason at all to aid distant sufferers.

Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations

How far does globalization extend the boundaries of community by bringing distant suffering directly into the lives of onlookers, and how far does the greater visibility of suffering arouse compassion and a willingness to help? Modern self-images that stress the growth of emotional identification between the members of the same society encourage the belief that similar attachments may develop at the level of humanity as a whole. Critics of this position emphasize deep-seated tendencies to remain indifferent to remote suffering. In the light of these differences, this paper asks whether the extension of human solidarity largely depends on the development of feelings of guilt or shame when harm is done to ‘distant strangers’ or when little is done to help them. It asks whether universal vulnerabilities to basic forms of mental and physical suffering create the possibility of global empathy and sympathy, and whether the idea of ‘embodied cosmopolitanism’ provides adequate normative foundations for collective action to reduce unnecessary suffering in distant places.

Antinomies of generosity: Moral geographies and post-tsunami aid in Southeast Asia

The Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 generated a wave of private donations from Western countries – a paradigmatic case of generosity. However, more than a year after, a number of evaluation studies conclude that post-tsunami aid has achieved ambivalent results and that recipients of aid felt excluded from the reconstruction process, reduced to passive observers. This paper argues that there is a link between the abundance of generosity and the practices of aid: the practices of gift giving after the tsunami have developed a humiliating force for those who were at the recipient end of the gift chain, because the marketing of Western generosity by media and aid agencies reinforced those affected by the tsunami as “pure” victims, as “bare life” – passive recipients devoid of their status as fellow citizens on this planet. In a second step, the paper discusses the meta-ethics of these practices of generosity, thinking about the ambivalences inherent in bridging distance in encountering the “distant” other in our aid practices. Various forms of virtue ethics reflect this emphasis on the generous person, while neglecting the perspective of the person in need, and therefore implicitly reproduce those asymmetries of gift giving. In contrast to these conceptions, I want to argue that we need to ground our duty to help distant sufferers in their moral entitlement to be aided. This requires a meta-ethical approach that seeks a combination of a theory of justice with virtue ethics.