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Communicating Research

FMC Cross-Departmental Seminar Series 2015-16

The Faculty of Media and Communication at BU

Venue: W240, Weymouth House, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB

Wednesday 18 May 2016, 4pm, W240

A Journalism Research Group Guest Lecture

Tim Markham, Birkbeck (University of London)

Making Audiences Care: Journalistic Depictions of Distant Suffering

One of the tropes often heard in journalism research is that audiences suffer from compassion fatigue: with all the suffering going on in the world, they aren’t willing or able to care about it as much as journalists want them to. This is usually framed in pejorative terms, with readers and viewers seen as cosseted, and in response scholars and practitioners try to come up with new ways of breaking through the desensitised fog in which people are thought to live. In this seminar it will be seen that such strategies are largely counter-productive, and that if we want to reengage audiences with the realities of conflict and injustice we need to understand better how they pay attention to it amid the routines and rhythms of everyday life.

About the series

This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, media, communication and marketing studies. The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of

The Centre for Politics and Media Research

The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community

Promotional Cultures & Communication Centre

Public Relations Research Centre

Narrative Research Group

Journalism Research Group

Advances in Media Management Research Group

Kind Regards,

Brian

Brian McNulty

Research Development Co-ordinator