Shani Orgad

The Transformative Potential of Online Communication: The case of breast cancer patients' Internet spaces

Based on interviews with breast cancer patients, this paper critically examines the transformative potential of patients’ online communication of their illness experiences. I explore the possibilities, the challenges, and the constraints it affords to its participants. I argue that, while breast cancer Internet spaces enable women to transform their experience in meaningful ways, and change to some extent the social and cultural environments in which these experiences are embedded, such transformation is nevertheless limited in social and political terms. The proliferation of personal voices speaking online about the experience of breast cancer, does not necessarily translate into a full recognition of the illness as a social issue. I highlight some of the reasons for this limitation, and suggest several directions for both research and website design, about how to enhance the political potential of these online contexts, and more generally, how we think about “the transformative” in the study of online communication.

The cultural dimensions of online communication: a study of breast cancer patients’ internet spaces

Many have studied the interrelations between online spaces and offline contexts, highlighting that internet spaces are fundamentally embedded within specific social, cultural and material contexts. Drawing upon a study of breast cancer patients’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), this article aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of cultural elements in shaping the participation in and design of, CMC environments. It uses an analysis of patients’ interviews and breast cancer websites as an exploratory site for identifying cultural dimensions that should be considered in studying online spaces. It shows how both the breast cancer sites and their participants emphasize a sense of global similarity and commonality, while at the same time this CMC context is shaped by specific linguistic, national, temporal, spatial, religious, ideological and discursive North-American dimensions. It concludes with a broader discussion of the importance of examining the cultural aspects of online contexts and by extension, how cultural elements shape the methodologies that researchers employ.

The Confidence Cult(ure)

Abstract In this paper we explore how confidence has become a technology of self that invites girls and women to work on themselves. The discussion demonstrates the extensiveness of what we call the ‘cult(ure) of confidence’ across different areas of social life, and examines the continuities in the way that exponents of the confidence cult(ure) name, diagnose and propose solutions to archetypal feminist questions about labour, value and the body. Our analysis focuses on two broad areas of social life in which the notion of confidence has taken hold powerfully in the last few years: popular discussions about gender and work, and consumer body culture. Examining the incitements to self-confidence in these realms, we show how an emergent technology of confidence, systematically re-signifies feminist accounts, by turning away from structural inequalities and collectivist critiques of male domination into heightened modes of self-work and self-regulation, and by repudiating the injuries inflicted by the structures of inequality. We conclude by situating the ‘confidence cult(ure)’ in relation to wider debates about feminism, postfeminism and neoliberalism.

Visualizers of solidarity: organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs

Discussion of the visual politics of solidarity, in relation specifically to the representation of suffering and development, has been grounded in analysis of images. This article seeks to expand this debate by exploring the organizational politics that shape and are shaped by these images. The article is inspired by production studies in the cultural industries and draws on interviews with 17 professionals from 10 UK-based international development and humanitarian organizations that are engaged in planning and producing imagery of international development and humanitarian issues. The author discusses how power relations, tensions and position-taking shape the arguments and choices made by NGOs producing images of suffering and development. She focuses on two arenas of struggle about how to visualize solidarity: (a) intra-organizational politics – specifically tensions within NGOs between fundraising and/or marketing departments, and communications, campaign and/or advocacy departments; and (2) inter-organizational politics: the competing tendencies towards convergence, cohesiveness and collective identity of the humanitarian sector, and competition, distinction and divergence between organizations on the other. She shows that NGOs’ visual production is an area of conflict, negotiation and compromise, and argues for the crucial need for attention to organizational politics in the production of visual representations of distant suffering in order to uncover diverse and competing motivations, and the forces driving current humanitarian and development communications.

Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’

The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, the paper seeks to understand the construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change, and to examine the implications of this. It suggests that this shift is intertwined with what we call ‘selfie humanitarianism’ in which helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned. The structure of the paper is as follows. First we consider the literature about the depoliticization of humanitarian campaigns in the context of neoliberalism and the growing significance of corporate actors in the world of international aid and disaster relief. Next we examine similar processes in the commodification and export of discourses of ‘girl power’. We then argue that these have come together in the emerging ‘girl powering of development’ (Koffman and Gill 2013), a cocktail of celebratory ‘girlafestoes’ and empowerment strategies often spread virally via social media; celebrity endorsements; and corporate branding which stress that ‘I matter and so does she’ and elide the differences between pop stars and CEO of multinational corporations on the one hand, and girls growing up poor in the global South on the other. Our paper focuses on contemporary examples from the Girl Up campaign. The paper argues that far from being ‘post’ girl power, global humanitarian and development discourses constitute a new and instensified focus upon the figure of the girl and a distinctive, neo-colonial, neoliberal and postfeminist articulation of girl power.

The ‘stay-at-home’ mother, postfeminism and neoliberalism: Content analysis of UK news coverage:

This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothers.

The Survivor in Contemporary Culture and Public Discourse: A Genealogy

This article sketches a genealogy examining the production of the concept of “the survivor” in contemporary culture and public discourse across five discursive sites in mainly western (particularly Anglo-American) cultures: the Holocaust, psychotherapy, feminist discourses of childhood and sexual abuse, reality TV, and discourses of health and illness. It argues that the survivor has become a meaningfully visible, cultural notion and a desirable role that individuals are encouraged to assume, rendering the categories of victim and the dead false and illegitimate. The article concludes by arguing for the need in contemporary public and highly mediated space to expand the range of explanatory frameworks through which individuals, especially those experiencing suffering, come to think, judge, and act.

Watching How Others Watch Us: The Israeli Media's Treatment of International Coverage of the Gaza War

This article examines how national broadcast media in Israel reported on the international coverage of the Gaza war. It show how, on the one hand, the national medias treatment of international coverage generated effective estrangement: casting doubt on commonsensical national discourses and encouraging a critical and reflexive reporting. At the same time, the Israeli medias coverage of “how others see us” reinforced attachment: it reproduced consensual and familiar narratives and denied alternative voices. The discussion highlights the significance of journalism during war for cultivating critical distance from national commonsensical narratives, and demonstrates how effective estrangement may be achieved.

'Intimacy at a distance' in humanitarian communication

While humanitarian communication has been scrutinized by practitioners and academics, the role and meanings of intimacy at a distance in this communication have been largely overlooked. Based on analysis of 17 in-depth interviews with professionals in 10 UK-based international NGOs engaged in planning, designing and producing humanitarian communications, this article explores how intimacy figures in NGOs’ thinking about and practice of humanitarian communication. Drawing on discussions of ‘intimacy at a distance’ and the ‘intimization’ of the mediated public sphere, the analysis explores three metaphors of intimacy used by interviewees to articulate the relationships they seek to develop with and between their beneficiaries and UK audiences: (1) sitting together underneath a tree; (2) being there; and (3) going on a journey. The article situates the governance of intimacy of practitioners’ thinking and practice as NGOs’ attempt to respond to criticisms from the humanitarian and international development sector, policymakers and scholars. It concludes by calling for a revisiting of the centrality of intimacy in humanitarian communication and the logic of emotional capitalism within which it is embedded, outlining its implications for both academic scholarship and practice.

The internet as a moral space: the legacy of Roger Silverstone

On 16 June 2006, exactly a month before Roger Silverstone’s shocking death, we had our annual Media@LSE ‘Away Day’: an occasion at which members of the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE talk to one another about current and future research interests, sharing their passions, concerns, anxieties and hopes.We went to the historic and beautiful Cumberland Lodge, set in the heart of Windsor Great Park – a stark contrast to the setting of our London offices.There, on a perfect English sunny summer day, ensconced in the greenery of the Park, Roger talked about the issues that occupied his thinking in the last couple of years, which he had developed most profoundly in his last book, Media and Morality (2006). He spoke about the moral significance of the media as the primary framework for people’s understanding of the world. He described his conception of the ‘mediapolis’, which draws on Hanna Arendt’s thinking, to describe contemporary media as a global space of appearance. For him, the notion of ‘mediapolis’ underlined the moral role of the media, in providing, in his words, ‘a shareable support for difference’. On that now very special and memorable day, Roger described the projects he planned to undertake in the future, all part of what he saw as a broader critical project of establishing the primacy of the ethical in social life and, in particular, of the thinking around how the media might be seen to enable or disable, facilitate or deny, moral life. I want to focus in this piece on what I see as some of the implications of Roger Silverstone’s work on media and morality for the study of new media and the internet in particular.This account does not come close to doing justice to his rich and complex work, which extends far beyond the study of