[ecrea] call for chapters for edited book: Mediated Shame: Disparaging Poverty in Media and Popular Culture

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Book title:
Mediated Shame: Disparaging Poverty in Media and Popular Culture

Book editors:
Irena Reifová (Charles University, Prague)
Martin Hájek (Charles University, Prague)

The aim of the proposed book “Mediated Shame: Disparaging Poverty in 
Media and Popular Culture” is to explore how media impose shame on and 
facilitate shaming of economically underperforming people who have poor 
living standards and belong to the lower class. Media-related shaming 
practices gained momentum after reality television programs had set out 
to film ordinary people in their everyday circumstances after 1990 
(Redden, 2017), during the process Graeme Turner (2010) dubbed “demotic 
turn”. Many scholars have observed  coincidence between Reality TV´s 
hayday after 1990 and consolidation of neoliberal rationality in Western 
societies (McCarthy, 2007; Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Lyle, 2008; Skeggs 
and Wood, 2012; Redden, 2017).  It is neoliberal focus on self-managed 
subjects taking responsibility into their hands, running themselves as 
micro-corporations and doing without social cushion provided by the 
state which was identified as homological with Reality TV´s capacity to 
put those who fail in this game on an imaginary pillory (Hess and 
Waller, 2014).  Stigmatisation of the attributes which are found to be 
upsetting, unsettling or threatening - such as being in the financial 
hardships, using the consumer loans excessively, living on social 
welfare, raising children in miserable material or hygienic condition - 
is ever more common in convergent and multiplatform media culture.  
Media shaming incentives are easily taken over and elaborated by the 
online audiences and disseminated via their networked communication 
channels in a viral way.

With regard to the above indicated focus of the book, we seek the 
chapters outlining empirical research or theoretical reflections on the 
manifestations and motivations of media-related shaming discourses and 
narratives addressing poverty across various media types and genres.

We invite the chapters not limited to but including reflections on the 
above stated questions and other relevant issues pertinent to the 
emergence of poverty shaming in and through media.  Who are producers 
and targets of poverty shaming in the realm of media popular culture? 
What specific facets of social positions and cultural identities are 
being subjected to shaming discourses? Does shaming respond to the 
particular frustrations and anxieties as endured by those who stoop to 
shaming? How do media industry professionals understand and interpret 
incorporation of shaming figures in the media outlets they develop and 
produce? What semiotic means of stigmatizing poverty are used in 
shaming? Does the shaming differ across societies? What are the 
historical forerunners of mediatized shaming? Can we trace any 
strategies of resistance or subversion of shaming?


Please, submit the abstracts of your chapters sticking to the following 
specifications:
Length of the abstract: 250-350 words
Submission deadline: 15 June, 2018
Submit to the address: (irena.reifova /at/ fsv.cuni.cz)

SOME INSPIRATION FOR ABSTRACT WRITING

The concept of mediated shaming

Shame is essentially a reflexive role-taking emotion anchored in 
anticipating a disgraceful assessment made by the others (Shott, 1979). 
This is why theoretical toolkit of symbolic interactionism is often used 
in sociological accounts of shame, drawing especially on Cooley's 
concept of “the looking glass self” (Cooley, 1902). Symbolic 
interactionism places identity formation in the centre of reciprocity of 
social interactions and explains formation of the self as a result of 
looking at oneself from the perspective of the others (Mead, 1934). 
Symbolic interactionists refer predominantly to interpersonal 
communication as a means through which we gain awareness of the regards 
of the others, but the model can be easily transcended to 
technologically facilitated media communication (Madianou, 2012). 
Furthermore, if people become an object of mediation, the way they are 
socially perceived in not just imagined, sensed or anticipated, but 
objectively evidenced, which makes mediated shame quite inescapable. 
Some writers attribute an important role to shame – the toll to be paid 
for deviating from the social norms or expectations – in preserving 
conformity and social order (Turner and Stets, 2005) while others 
underline that shaming can acquire the status of symbolic violence and 
“policing” the otherness (Scheff, 1995). By the same token, Walker 
(2014) suggests that shame should be understood also in the context of 
Goffman´s (1963) concept of stigma.

In an environment of networked hostility being facilitated or directly 
unleashed by the anonymity of online communication, the difference 
should be made between hate speech and shaming (Brown, 2017). Hate 
speech aspires to produce fear and feelings of being threatened whereas 
shame aims at degradation and humiliation. Hate speech therefore may 
take place in the privacy of interpersonal setting but effective shaming 
is predicated on the fact that it is enacted in front of the real or 
envisioned audience. Shaming is more effective if it takes place on 
stage, in front of the eyes of the others. The idea of the “generalised 
other”, our mental abstraction of the society´s gaze that matters and a 
condition of any shaming, is activated more vigorously in the presence 
of the existing others. Television programs and discussions on internet 
and social networks augmenting the TV content provide this kind of stage 
for rituals of humiliation.

The risk of being shamed increases as society turns ever more panoptical 
(Foucault, 1977; Poster, 2013) with its cross-media technological 
channels enabling thorough and almost permanent surveillance. Reality TV 
programs (converging with post-broadcast on-line video outlets and 
spread of viewers´ comments on the internet) made a significant 
contribution to the enhancement of the logics of narcissism and 
voyeurism, located at the other end of the panoptical polarity 
(Andrejevic, 2004; Hill, 2005). Shame and shaming can be framed as the 
dark side of the urge to be seen, observed and looked-at. On the other 
hand, shaming practices should not be disposed of as the deserved 
punishment for the actors struck by vanity and screen lust. It is also 
the imperative to constantly evaluate (and disparage) the others deeply 
embedded in the heart of assessment culture of contemporary neoliberal 
society that should be considered among the sources of mediated and 
media-enticed shame today.

The genres of shaming

In the study of mediated shaming of lower classes, attention has been 
given predominantly to Reality Television programs, with emphasis on 
makeover shows (Hirdman, 2015). Reality Television programs provide 
close insights into the backstage of everyday realities, produce and 
encourage various types of voyeuristic gazes fixed at what is deviating 
from “normalcy”. This is grounded in more or less tacit 
responsibilisation of the participants which goes hand in hand with the 
above described neoliberal rationality.  Within this process 
responsibility for the miseries of life is assigned to the participants 
themselves, it is hardly found in the external structural conditions. 
The participants are classified as problem cases unable to perform up to 
the expectations of consumer neoliberal society and consequently 
confronted with the requirements to (re)establish the autonomy of 
responsible, self-governing, self-disciplined subject. Sometimes they 
even get guidance, counselling and couching by the TV-hired experts who 
are supposed to help them to complete the mission of re-building the 
subject. Along the way, they are denigrated for the destitute life they 
have or lack of capacities to transform it. Reality TV is therefore 
viewed as cultural technology of neoliberal society as it amplifies 
neoliberal governmentality grounded in redirecting responsibilities, 
decisions and choices from the state to the individual subjects 
(Foucault, 2008). In neoliberal dictum, genuine neoliberal citizens 
should be free of all possible governing, except their endless ability 
to govern themselves  (Heller, 2006; Lyle, 2008; McCarthy, 2007; 
Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Redden, 2017; Skeggs and Wood, 2012).

Less exposed but equally important intersection between Reality TV and 
neoliberal policy is in the prominence both give to the assessment 
practices. Engines developed to evaluate and vote the participants out 
of the game are applied widely across entire Reality TV format starting 
from juries composed of celebrities (such as in X Factor, Freemantle 
Media, UK) and going to the viewers´ texting their preferences via SMS 
messages (such as in Big Brother, Endemol, NL). With its preoccupation 
with assessment practices, Reality TV programs “repeat after” neoliberal 
policies which deliver decisions not in style of direct, authority-based 
resolutions but use various forms of audit, evaluation and review-process.

We are open to chapters which align with the main stream in the study of 
mediated shame focusing on Reality Television programs but we also 
actively seek the chapters dealing with the issue of shaming in less 
prominent genres such as news programs (Hess and Waller, 2014), talk 
shows and online communication or digital amateur photography. The 
chapters looking at shaming practices on internet discussions or social 
networks may focus on the internet and social networks discussions which 
follow-up the preceding media programs as well as the stand-alone, 
autonomous discussions.

The dynamics of shaming and power

Analysis of mediated shaming significantly benefits from examination of 
the relationship between shaming discourses and power in society.

Mediated shame focused on disparaging the lower classes - as produced 
e.g. by Reality TV - is, according to many writers, cultural logic of 
neoliberal governmentality. As such it represents top-down flow of 
meanings deriving from the dominant neoliberal hegemony, which has been 
sketched above. It should be underlined again that mediated shaming 
embedded in or bolstered by the television gaze repeats the rationality 
of (neo)liberal governing not through oppression and manipulation but 
through freedom (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). The neoliberal citizens are 
positioned as free-floating subjects in the individualistic environment 
where there are no doctrines to manage and control them – with the 
exception of the capillary doctrine compelling them to manage and 
control themselves with their own capabilities, literacies and resources 
(Foucault, 2008). Mediated shaming repeats the very same neoliberal 
rationality by focusing on people´s imperfections, confronting them with 
requests to improve themselves by self-management – and shaming them if 
the projects of transformation of the selves come out awkward.

In contrast to the above described shaming discourses which victimise 
the powerless (those who suffer from being socially and/or economically 
weak or disadvantaged), shaming can be used also as a part of 
anti-hegemonic dynamics when it is those in power who are shamed. The 
anti-hegemonic line of shaming can be exemplified by the ways the 
politicians are captured in slogans and on posters of the political 
protests or as objects of cultural jamming genres (such as amateur 
caricatures or visual pranks) on social networks. In these cases, 
shaming follows a bottom-up strategy, as it is power-holders who are 
shamed. Bottom-up shaming can be compared to the resistant (even 
revolutionary) principle of the carnival as outlined by Bakhtin (1984).

We invite chapters on both articulations of shaming and power: the 
conceptions which see the mediated shaming as hegemony-laden 
stigmatisation of social misfits as well as those which put emphasis of 
counter-cultural potential of shaming if aimed at the power-holders.

List of References:

Andrejevic, M., 2004. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham: 
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bakhtin, M.M., 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press.
Brown, A., 2017. What is so special about online (as compared to 
offline) hate speech? Ethnicities, first published May 19, 2017.
Cooley, C.H., 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's.
Foucault, M., 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New 
York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de 
France, 1978-1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goffman, E., 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. 
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall.
Heller, D., 2006. The Great American Makeover: Television, History, 
Nation. Berlin: Springer.
Hess, K., Waller, L., 2014. The digital pillory: media shaming of 
“ordinary” people for minor crimes. Continuum, 28(1): 101–111.
Hill, A., 2005. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. 
New York: Routledge.
Hirdman, A., 2015. The passion of mediated shame: Affective reactivity 
and classed otherness in reality TV. European Journal of Cultural 
Studies, 19(3): 283–296.
Lyle, S.A., 2008. (Mis)recognition and the middle-class/bourgeois gaze: 
A case study of Wife Swap. Critical Discourse Studies, 5(4): 319–330.
Madianou, M., 2012. News as a looking-glass: Shame and the symbolic 
power of mediation. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(1): 3–16.
McCarthy, A., 2007. Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of 
Suffering. Social Text, 25(4): 17–42.
Mead, G.H., 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a 
Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ouellette, L., Hay, J., 2008. Better Living through Reality TV: 
Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship. London: Wiley.
Poster, M., 2013. The Second Media Age. London: John Wiley & Sons.
Redden, G., 2017. Is Reality TV Neoliberal? Television & New Media, 
first published September 12, 2017 .
Scheff, T.J., 1995. Editor’s Introduction: Shame and Related Emotions: 
An Overview. American Behavioral Scientist, 38(8): 1053–1059.
Shott, S., 1979. Emotion and Social Life: A Symbolic Interactionist 
Analysis.  American
Journal of Sociology, 84(6): 1317-1334.
Skeggs, B., Wood, H., 2012. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, 
Audience and Value. New York: Routledge.
Turner, G., 2010. Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn. 
London: SAGE.
Turner, J.H., Stets, J.E., 2005. The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.
Walker, R., 2014. The Shame of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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