Rethinking global challenges through feminist media and communication approaches

This research seminar series is organized by the Department of Communication* (IKO), Lund University, in cooperation with researchers from the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In the context of rapidly escalating global challenges, there is the need to expose and rethink normative and masculine understandings of key contemporary issues such as war, militarisation, care, peace, violence, resilience and sustainability, to name but a few.

This seminar series engages with feminist theory in media and communication studies to rediscover older and forgotten ways of knowing and thinking about these issues, and to imagine alternative ways of communicating in an era marked by global crises and armed conflicts.

Each seminar will focus on a particular issue and will be led by an invited prominent researcher from one of the world leading centers for excellent research, the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. All seminars are moderated by researchers at IKO.

The seminars are delivered in a hybrid format, which means that they take place in a physical location, but are simultaneously broadcasted online.

*Until January 1, 2025, IKO is partitioned into the Department of Strategic Communication (ISK) and the Department of Communication and Media (KOM).

Dates, times and locations

November 8, 13:00-15:00 (UTC+1)

The Faculty Club (SOL B131), Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund, and online via Zoom

Catherine Rottenberg
Professor, Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Theorizing Interdependence, Envisioning a Politics of Care"

In this talk I chart some of the key themes that have preoccupied me over the past decade – from neoliberal feminism to interdependence. I discuss how my interrogation of neoliberal feminism was, in many ways, an attempt to understand and theorize forms of governance and domination. I then outline my more recent work on the politics of care, focusing on the notion of interdependence. Offering a more robust theory of interdependence, I suggest, is key to reorienting our political vocabulary and practice in order to develop an emancipatory lexicon that cuts across identity claims and can more effectively challenge the hegemony of liberal imaginaries. I conclude by sketching some possible alternatives to our violent present by drawing on The Care Manifesto’s feminist, queer, anti-racist and eco-socialist vision.

Moderator: Monica Porzionato, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Strategic Communication (ISK)

November 15, 13:00–15:00 (UTC+1)

L303a, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund, and online via Zoom

Kathryn Higgins
Lecturer, Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Victimhood, victimcould, and the mediated politics of vulnerability"

The figure of the victim—once reviled as weak, infantilizing, and intolerably feminine—has been recently imbued with new cultural currency and political force. In this talk, I develop a critical commentary on an emerging paradigm of representation that I call mediated “victimcould,” whereby regressive and far-Right political projects use media to a) conjure visions of hypothetical futures of suffering and injury, and b) weaponize those visions within present-day struggles over the predicament of vulnerability. Rather than seeking to deceive, I show how these acts of creative premeditation invite their viewers to feel futures of victimization as if they were already taking place, engineering a moral mandate for practices of violence and exclusion designed to prevent those futures from emerging. Thus, while vulnerability has arguably emerged as the lingua franca of both progressive political movements and the reactionary movements of the far-right, I argue that victimcould often serves reactionary ends by strategically collapsing probability and possibility within our symbolic politics of vulnerability and by failing to hold imaginations of the future accountable to the enduring political realities of the present.

Moderator: Fredrika Thelandersson, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Communication and Media (KOM)

December 9, 13:00-15:00 (UTC+1)

A158, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund, and online via Zoom

Angela McRobbie
Emeritus Professor, Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Gender After Neoliberalism"

This lecture will extend the conjunctural Hall-influenced analysis of feminism and neoliberalism (McRobbie 2008, McRobbie 2020) by considering the feminist shifts that have ruptured the management of gender in media and popular culture that prevailed through two decades of neoliberal governance. In a context of rising violence and antagonism, including gender violence the limits of the politics of resilience are laid bare. How can feminist pedagogy counter hatred and hostility?

Moderator: Cecilia Cassinger, Associate professor, Department of Strategic Communication (ISK)