Taking as my starting point Hannah Arendt’s (1994/1943) observations on the public response to th... more Taking as my starting point Hannah Arendt’s (1994/1943) observations on the public response to the mass exile of Jews during World War Two, I argue that the UK’s mediatised reaction to those escaping conflict during the Mediterranean refugee crisis followed similar ideological patterns: fear, suspicion, antipathy and reserved compassion. I then move on to examine the role that human rights organisations had in the sympathetic re-construction of migrants/refugees. Here, I argue that at the same time as media platforms have become progressively more intertwined, ideologically complex, and perhaps as a result more responsive to shifting narratives and the changing public mood about the other, non-governmental organisations continue to operate within an established system of representation that render the migrant abject in terms of western dominance. In response to this reading of the refugee crisis, I offer the conclusion that while discourses produced by the various actors with a stake in the construction and counter-construction of the crisis were multifaceted and dynamic in their response to the evolving situation, the competing narratives surrounding the event remained resolutely embedded within a neocolonial discourse of otherness.
Transmedia Crime Stories: The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Globalised Media Sphere., 2016
The chapter focuses on the discursive transformation of the two women at the centre of the Knox t... more The chapter focuses on the discursive transformation of the two women at the centre of the Knox trail – Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher. Following Freud, I argue that the original mediatised trial of Knox and Sollecito presented a narrative of sexual transgression as a way of re-ordering gender relations. In order for this narrative to operate, the women in the case were discursively transformed into saint and sinner roles that allowed for a titillating, yet hyper-moral, discourse to develop. While the men at the centre of the crime were largely ignored, and Kercher was rehabilitated into a virtuous victim, Knox metamorphosed into a malign sexual deviant through a hyper-moralised discourse in the British and Italian press that served to reinforce stereotypically gendered view of female deviance.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2014
The perceived failure of minority communities to integrate into mainstream culture and society ha... more The perceived failure of minority communities to integrate into mainstream culture and society has been of such concern in recent years that there have been a series of political endeavors to shore up notions of citizenship, inclusion, and (national) identity, indeed about what it means to be British. This paper considers political discourses about the failure of multiculturalism and the subsequent implementation of community cohesion strategies in relation to David Cameron’s recent treatise on muscular liberalism, in order to reflect upon notions of segregation, identity and cohesion in the United Kingdom. Data from the Muslims in the European Mediascape project is used to consider to what extent dominant hegemonic discourses of Muslim communities permeate media production practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with mainstream media producers in the United Kingdom, the key concern of this paper is to explore whether media production practices can be said to reinforce the current form of hegemonic liberalism.
In 1974 Paul Watson’s The Family pioneered the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ technique to build a picture of ... more In 1974 Paul Watson’s The Family pioneered the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ technique to build a picture of family life that also exposed inequalities contained in British society. Today, film-maker Jonathan Smith, has updated this format using technologies usually found in reality programming to focus on the mundane practices of family life, in Channel 4’s The Family (2008). However, instead of the meta-narratives of class, race and gender divisions, displayed in the 1970s documentary, today’s version appears to have been stripped of politics. In this article I argue it is problematic that family representation is solely concerned with the minutiae of everyday life. Arguing that The Family simply became another form of display for the participants of a reality documentary, I consider the possibility that we have seen the end of the sociological imagination in factual film-making and attempt to find responses to this dilemma in current social theory.
The International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2010
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large par... more It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terrorism and its global media coverage which has, we argue, resulted in a politics of fear that acts to legitimate ever-increasing legislative controls. In an attempt to reveal how discourse works to support such regulation, in the second part of this article we offer a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles from the UK about acts of terrorism that have taken place since the suicide bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005. Together with an analysis of the political speeches of Bush and Blair, we examine how far these discourses can be said to have reframed notions of inclusion/exclusion for Muslim populations. Finally we present a discussion of the consequences of such terrorist acts and their varied representations for the future of the British multicultural imaginary.
What can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal ... more What can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal system and the media contribute to a collective understanding of class, nation, race and gender? In this book, Siobhan Holohan explores media representations of law and order in the context of notions of multi-culturalism and victim-centred politics. Two high profile cases - the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the US trial of the British au-pair, Louise Woodward - are examined. Holohan argues that the stories built up around Woodward and Lawrence - the organization of public discourse around a sacrificial figure - have contributed to exclusionary patterns of social order. The book offers a perceptive account of what makes some criminal legal cases prone to scrutiny and spectacle and provides a vivid illustration of the presence of power relations in legal decisions. In conclusion, the author draws on the model of the Macpherson report to propose a more inclusive form of social and legal judgement that takes into account social inequalities.
Following Le Pen's relative success in the French presidential vote and the British National ... more Following Le Pen's relative success in the French presidential vote and the British National Party's historic return in our own 2002 local elections, the article considers the prospects for the production of more communicative race relations in contemporary Britain. To this end we reassess the media'streatment of the Stephen Lawrence case and explore the political logic of the Macpherson report, the policy document which followed the apparent miscarriage of justice that allowed Lawrence's alleged killers to walk free. In terms of our analysis of the media we are concerned to show how the real of Britain's ordinary racism was hidden behind an ideologyof multiculturalism that scapegoated singular individuals to cover for the structural inequalities of wider society. The article aimsto show how the media upheld the notion ofobjective justice that institutional law wasapparently unable to secure.
But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings of institutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation of institutional justice. Although we accept that the attempt to achieve legal totality is impossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjective rights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model of race relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernise around the idealistic demands of its own ideological structure. Akin to Douzinas,1 who has argued for the endless expansion of rights as post-modern utopianism, we believe that this process of modernisation, which is arranged to maintain the status quo through minimal reform, is the condition of possibility of a more inclusive system of race relations.
Taking as my starting point Hannah Arendt’s (1994/1943) observations on the public response to th... more Taking as my starting point Hannah Arendt’s (1994/1943) observations on the public response to the mass exile of Jews during World War Two, I argue that the UK’s mediatised reaction to those escaping conflict during the Mediterranean refugee crisis followed similar ideological patterns: fear, suspicion, antipathy and reserved compassion. I then move on to examine the role that human rights organisations had in the sympathetic re-construction of migrants/refugees. Here, I argue that at the same time as media platforms have become progressively more intertwined, ideologically complex, and perhaps as a result more responsive to shifting narratives and the changing public mood about the other, non-governmental organisations continue to operate within an established system of representation that render the migrant abject in terms of western dominance. In response to this reading of the refugee crisis, I offer the conclusion that while discourses produced by the various actors with a stake in the construction and counter-construction of the crisis were multifaceted and dynamic in their response to the evolving situation, the competing narratives surrounding the event remained resolutely embedded within a neocolonial discourse of otherness.
Transmedia Crime Stories: The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Globalised Media Sphere., 2016
The chapter focuses on the discursive transformation of the two women at the centre of the Knox t... more The chapter focuses on the discursive transformation of the two women at the centre of the Knox trail – Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher. Following Freud, I argue that the original mediatised trial of Knox and Sollecito presented a narrative of sexual transgression as a way of re-ordering gender relations. In order for this narrative to operate, the women in the case were discursively transformed into saint and sinner roles that allowed for a titillating, yet hyper-moral, discourse to develop. While the men at the centre of the crime were largely ignored, and Kercher was rehabilitated into a virtuous victim, Knox metamorphosed into a malign sexual deviant through a hyper-moralised discourse in the British and Italian press that served to reinforce stereotypically gendered view of female deviance.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2014
The perceived failure of minority communities to integrate into mainstream culture and society ha... more The perceived failure of minority communities to integrate into mainstream culture and society has been of such concern in recent years that there have been a series of political endeavors to shore up notions of citizenship, inclusion, and (national) identity, indeed about what it means to be British. This paper considers political discourses about the failure of multiculturalism and the subsequent implementation of community cohesion strategies in relation to David Cameron’s recent treatise on muscular liberalism, in order to reflect upon notions of segregation, identity and cohesion in the United Kingdom. Data from the Muslims in the European Mediascape project is used to consider to what extent dominant hegemonic discourses of Muslim communities permeate media production practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with mainstream media producers in the United Kingdom, the key concern of this paper is to explore whether media production practices can be said to reinforce the current form of hegemonic liberalism.
In 1974 Paul Watson’s The Family pioneered the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ technique to build a picture of ... more In 1974 Paul Watson’s The Family pioneered the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ technique to build a picture of family life that also exposed inequalities contained in British society. Today, film-maker Jonathan Smith, has updated this format using technologies usually found in reality programming to focus on the mundane practices of family life, in Channel 4’s The Family (2008). However, instead of the meta-narratives of class, race and gender divisions, displayed in the 1970s documentary, today’s version appears to have been stripped of politics. In this article I argue it is problematic that family representation is solely concerned with the minutiae of everyday life. Arguing that The Family simply became another form of display for the participants of a reality documentary, I consider the possibility that we have seen the end of the sociological imagination in factual film-making and attempt to find responses to this dilemma in current social theory.
The International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2010
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large par... more It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terrorism and its global media coverage which has, we argue, resulted in a politics of fear that acts to legitimate ever-increasing legislative controls. In an attempt to reveal how discourse works to support such regulation, in the second part of this article we offer a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles from the UK about acts of terrorism that have taken place since the suicide bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005. Together with an analysis of the political speeches of Bush and Blair, we examine how far these discourses can be said to have reframed notions of inclusion/exclusion for Muslim populations. Finally we present a discussion of the consequences of such terrorist acts and their varied representations for the future of the British multicultural imaginary.
What can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal ... more What can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal system and the media contribute to a collective understanding of class, nation, race and gender? In this book, Siobhan Holohan explores media representations of law and order in the context of notions of multi-culturalism and victim-centred politics. Two high profile cases - the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the US trial of the British au-pair, Louise Woodward - are examined. Holohan argues that the stories built up around Woodward and Lawrence - the organization of public discourse around a sacrificial figure - have contributed to exclusionary patterns of social order. The book offers a perceptive account of what makes some criminal legal cases prone to scrutiny and spectacle and provides a vivid illustration of the presence of power relations in legal decisions. In conclusion, the author draws on the model of the Macpherson report to propose a more inclusive form of social and legal judgement that takes into account social inequalities.
Following Le Pen's relative success in the French presidential vote and the British National ... more Following Le Pen's relative success in the French presidential vote and the British National Party's historic return in our own 2002 local elections, the article considers the prospects for the production of more communicative race relations in contemporary Britain. To this end we reassess the media'streatment of the Stephen Lawrence case and explore the political logic of the Macpherson report, the policy document which followed the apparent miscarriage of justice that allowed Lawrence's alleged killers to walk free. In terms of our analysis of the media we are concerned to show how the real of Britain's ordinary racism was hidden behind an ideologyof multiculturalism that scapegoated singular individuals to cover for the structural inequalities of wider society. The article aimsto show how the media upheld the notion ofobjective justice that institutional law wasapparently unable to secure.
But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings of institutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation of institutional justice. Although we accept that the attempt to achieve legal totality is impossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjective rights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model of race relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernise around the idealistic demands of its own ideological structure. Akin to Douzinas,1 who has argued for the endless expansion of rights as post-modern utopianism, we believe that this process of modernisation, which is arranged to maintain the status quo through minimal reform, is the condition of possibility of a more inclusive system of race relations.
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Papers by Siobhan Holohan
But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings of institutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation of institutional justice. Although we accept that the attempt to achieve legal totality is impossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjective rights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model of race relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernise around the idealistic demands of its own ideological structure. Akin to Douzinas,1 who has argued for the endless expansion of rights as post-modern utopianism, we believe that this process of modernisation, which is arranged to maintain the status quo through minimal reform, is the condition of possibility of a more inclusive system of race relations.
But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings of institutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation of institutional justice. Although we accept that the attempt to achieve legal totality is impossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjective rights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model of race relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernise around the idealistic demands of its own ideological structure. Akin to Douzinas,1 who has argued for the endless expansion of rights as post-modern utopianism, we believe that this process of modernisation, which is arranged to maintain the status quo through minimal reform, is the condition of possibility of a more inclusive system of race relations.