5 Reasons You Won't Want to Miss “Media and January 6”
With 3 days to go until this event, check out the reasons you will want to join us 👇👇👇
Join Us for a Day of Insightful Discussions and Critical Reflections
This Friday, April 12th, is “Media and January 6th”. Join us for a day of insightful discussions with leading scholars in social science, media, and policy as we delve into the events of January 6th, 2021, and explore crucial avenues for safeguarding democracy. We’ll discuss practical strategies to defend democracy and address contemporary challenges, while understanding the historical significance of January 6th and its implications for the future.
You don’t want to miss this event. Here’s why:
Leading scholars across multiple disciplines will unravel January 6th, offering diverse perspectives from fields such as political science, communication, media studies, information science, sociology, digital media, and education.
Engage in insightful and varied panel discussions covering various aspects of January 6th, from understanding the events to researching threats to democracy and defending democracy. Topics include "Understanding January 6th," "Researching Threats to Democracy," and "Defending Democracy," ensuring a comprehensive exploration of the topic. Panel discussions will provide attendees with concrete takeaways and actionable strategies to address contemporary challenges and safeguard democratic values.
Take advantage of networking opportunities during meal and coffee breaks to connect with other attendees and panelists. These breaks provide valuable opportunities for informal discussions and relationship-building.
Participate in interactive Q&A sessions following each panel, allowing you to engage directly with experts and delve deeper into key topics. These sessions provide a platform for attendees to pose questions, share insights, and foster dialogue with panelists.
Free books 👀 for in-person attendees including…
Propagandists Playbook by Francesca Tripodi
Wrong by Dannagal Young
The Branding of Right-Wing Activism by Khadijah Costley White
The Political Weaponization of Victimhood
While what constitutes “victimhood” status has been long-debated, claims to victimhood are leveraged by a wide variety of actors to politically meaningful ends—and the inherent morality we tend to attach to victims we consider legitimate makes this a useful political strategy for many. In “Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump,” recently published in Perspectives on Politics, Jessie Barton Hronešová and Daniel Kreiss introduce the concept of “hijacked victimhood” to illustrate how politicians and others in elite positions craft narratives strategically portraying dominant groups as victims of oppression at the hands of marginalized or subaltern groups. In doing so, narratives reliant on hijacked victimhood portray marginalized groups as threats to the security of dominant groups and delegitimize victimhood claims among the marginalized.
Hronešová and Kreiss consider hijacked victimhood a specific form of strategic victimhood. While strategic victimhood serves as a useful political communication practice for those seeking equity and justice, when hijacked, it can permit “dominant groups and their representatives [to] strategically invert moral relations and subvert empirical understandings of harm to defend, preserve, or expand their power.” Hijacked victimhood is therefore tied to a specific group of potential victims—those who, in a national or other broad sociopolitical context, are in positions of social dominance or power.
To demonstrate what hijacked victimhood looks like in practice, Hronešová and Kreiss examined speeches from two contemporary political leaders employing populist, nationalist platforms—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Though Orbán and Trump differ in their specific employment of hijacked victimhood, both rely on narratives of hijacked victimhood frequently and in often strikingly similar ways. Orbán and Trump alike portray their white, Christian constituents as put-upon and exploited by a shadowy “elite” and under threat from nonwhite immigrant “Others” who themselves are frequently construed as pawns in the plans of global “elites.” Both leaders also attempt to connect the apparent current victimhood of the dominant groups they claim to represent to supposed legacies of victimization—and both assert the only way to escape these legacies of victimhood is through the protection of Orbán and Trump as saviors, respectively.
Elite narratives reliant on hijacked victimhood do more than secure those crafting the narratives positions in power: they also “weake[n] and delegitimize[e] claims of actual victims, demoraliz[e] communities of out-groups, and desensitiz[e] majority populations to sources of human suffering.” Understanding when strategic victimhood is hijacked, then, helps us to understand the ways in which strategies that may further equity in justice in some contexts can be used to unjust ends in other arenas.
(Research Summary by Katherine Furl)
Publications and appearances
“[AI is] another technology but because it’s so new we tend to get this great excitement and also this moral panic... Like many other technologies, most of the time it’s is going to be used in pretty benign ways, but there will always be the outlier cases that can have these huge impacts.” Shannon McGregor spoke with INDY Week about AI and “how to help the next generation of reporters manage through a seismic shift in technology.”
Coming soon
April
Media and January 6th: On April 12th, CITAP will be hosting an event in celebration and reflection of the launch of the book “Media and January 6th.”
Find more info about the panels, panelists, and schedule for the day here! UNC students are eligible to receive CLE credit for each panel.
Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: On April 16th from 6:00-7:30pm, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is hosting their annual Wade H. Hargrove Media Law and Policy Colloquium: “Media Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The event features David McCraw, Ruth Okediji, Nadine Farid Johnson, and Lyrissa Lidsky, and will be moderated by David Ardia.