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Eyewitness Textures:

User Generated Content & News Coverage in the 21st Century

May 23 & 24, 2019 at the MacEwan University,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Lilie Chouliraki

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interest lies in the histories and challenges of mediated suffering. She is the recipient of three international awards for her publications, more recently the Outstanding Book of the Year award of the International Communication Association (ICA 2015, for ‘The Ironic Spectator’). Her work has been published in French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Danish, Greek and (currently) in Chinese.

Dr. Chouliaraki’s work focuses on three domains in which the human body-in-need appears as a problem of communication: i) disaster news, ii) humanitarian campaigns & celebrity advocacy, iii) war & conflict reporting. She has published extensively on how digital platforms and genres (twitter, mobile phone footage, selfies) are fundamentally changing conflict reporting and the witnessing of war today. Her book on the topic, entitled ‘Witnesisng without responsibility. Digital testimonies from conflict zones’ is forthcoming in Columbia University Press.

Other publications include ‘Discourse in Late Modernity’ (1999), ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering’ (2006), ‘The Soft Power of War’ (ed., 2008), ‘The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism’ (2013), ‘The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communciation’ (2019; co-ed) and ‘The Digital Border. Mobility, technology and power’ (New York Univesity Press, 2019) as well as over sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Dr. Mette Mortensen

Mette Mortensen, PhD is Associate Professor in media studies at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. She is the Principal Investigator of the large, collective research project Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images (Velux Foundation 2017-2021) and the research network Media and Fear (Einar Hansen Foundation 2017-2019). Her research interests include images and conflicts, journalism studies, visual social media and celebrity studies.