Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe

The key concepts of the book are media, class, poverty, and shaming. The contributors to this book examine how certain social relations and their cultural meanings in the media, namely class and poverty, are transformed into factual or moral attributes of people and situations. Class and poverty are not understood as certain things and actions, or concepts and numbers; both class and poverty are assumed to be, above all, particular social relationships or a set of relations between people, things and symbols.
Without denying that contempt for the destitute Other is an affect found throughout history and in various socioeconomic contexts, the chapters in this book through their concern with the mediated gaze on class narrate predominantly the challenges brought about by the media's spectacular take on poverty and low status as they (at least) coincide with the neoliberal era.
This volume will be essential reading forthe scholars specialising in the study of media and social inequalities form the vantage points of Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology or European Studies.

Counters the dominant emphasis on the West in media studies by looking at cultural negotiations of class and poverty in different regions of Europe Extends the variety of genres and types of media whose shaming practices are analyzed, by focusing on realms other than reality television without omitting its substantial role in stigmatization of poverty Contributes to the regeneration of the study of class in media and cultural studies

Autorentext

Irena Reifová is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czechia. She is focusing on cultural studies, theory of popular culture, television studies and post-socialist mediated memory. Since 2016 she has been working as ECREA General Secretary.
Martin Hájek is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czechia. His research interests are normative orders of society, symbolic interactionism, discourse and narrative analysis. He is the author of a monograph on various types of textual analysis and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.

Inhalt

1. Chapter 1: Perspectives on Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty in European Contexts; Irena Reifová and Martin Hájek.- 2. Chapter 2: 'Benefits Scroungers' and Stigma: Exploring the Abject-Grotesque in British Poverty Porn Programming; Louise Cope.- 3. Chapter 3: Neural Attunement to Others: Shame, Social Status, and Rewarded Viewing in Reality Television in Sweden; Anja Hirdman.- 4. Chapter 4: Shame, (Dis)Empowerment and Resistance in Diasporic Media: Romanian Transnational Migrants' Reclassification Struggles; Irina Diana Mdroane.- 5. Chapter 5: Mediating Class in a Classless Society? Media and Social Inequalities in Socialist Eastern Europe; Sabina Mihelj.- 6. Chapter 6: Invisibility or Inevitability: Performing Poverty in Czech Reality Television; Martin Hájek and Daniel Frantál.- 7. Chapter 7: Shaming Working-Class People on Reality Television: Perspectives from Swedish Television Production; Peter Jakobsson and Fredrik Stiernstedt.- 8. Chapter 8: Disparaging 'the Assisted': Shaming and Blaming Social Welfare Recipients in Romania and Hungary; Hanna Orsolya Vincze, Andreea Alina Mogo and Radu Mihai Meza.- 9. Chapter 9: Othering without Blaming: Representing Poverty in Flemish Factual Entertainment ; Alexander Dhoest, Marleen te Walvaart and Koen Panis.- 10. Chapter 10: Inter- and Intranational Mediated Shaming to Justify Austerity Measures: The Case of the 'Greek Crisis'; Yiannis Mylonas.- 11. Chapter 11: Social Distances through Scopic Practices: How Czech Reality Television Audiences Negotiate Social Inequalities ; Irena Reifová.- 12. Chapter 12: Everybody is a Fool: Rural Life, Social Order and Carnivalesque Marginalisation in a Hungarian Television Series; Balázs Varga.