Do we know how it feels to live in a refugee reality by stepping in his/her virtual shoes? Can the critical spectator move beyond irony in the face of humanitarian campaigns? Is there any potential for media representations to engage audiences of distant suffering, and to foster empathy for the victims of humanitarian crises?
In his thesis “Regarding Distant Suffering - Audience engagement with representations of humanitarian disaster”, Dr. Johannes von Engelhardt explores the question of humanitarian compassion in the age of ever-accessible (social-) media. On the sixth of September, Von Engelhardt successfully defended his dissertation that explores audience reception and interpretation of media representations of distant suffering.
Acknowledging that disaster has become a standard ingredient of our daily news-feed, his studies explore the affordances of three forms of humanitarian representation from an audience perspective. To investigate this challenging question, Von Engelhardt employed qualitative-, as well as quantitative research methods to assess the potential- and/or limits that conventional, as well as so called ‘post-humanitarian’ – forms of representation have in raising public engagement with distant suffering.
As part of his PhD research project, Von Engelhardt conducted four studies to both understand the audience’s reception of the compassionate message; and identify what specific elements of representation might facilitate certain empathic responses. His studies reveal the complex nature of various forms of audience engagement, that doesn’t seem to allow for any black or white categorisation. As seen from the bright side, Von Engelhardt’s studies show that compassion is not alien to today’s audiences. The resonance of empathy however relies on the experiential connectedness audiences feel to those who suffer.
Conversely, compassionate resonance is low when people fear their understanding of an imaginary Just World is threatened by the shocking message conveyed in moving pictures or animation. Conclusively, Engelhardt’s study shows that there is hope for the humanitarian mission in a time that particularly requests compassion and action. His call for more interdisciplinary audience research to inform crisis reporting and humanitarian campaigns sets the stage for future studies in the field of mediated humanitarianism.