Read All About It? Art and Journalism on the Dehumanisation of Marginalised Groups | Colette Olive (Leeds)

Read All About It? Art and Journalism on the Dehumanisation of Marginalised Groups 

Colette Olive (Leeds)

In this paper, I offer a rigorous comparison between art and journalism to reveal the unique ways in which artworks engage with and shape our understanding of contemporary socio-political affairs. Artists often draw inspiration from the news cycle — figures like Ai Weiwei or collectives like Forensic Architecture actively seek to reshape our perceptions of current injustices — and recent work in the cognitivist literature on politically-engaged art has drawn parallels between art and journalism (Bacharach 2023, Simoniti 2023). However, a significant problem facing any cognitivist account of art lies in determining whether artistic contributions to political discourse offer us anything original or distinctive, over and above contributions made by non-art disciplines like philosophy or journalism. I argue that the distinctiveness of art’s cognitive impact emerges most clearly when we attend to the ways in which it diverges from journalistic practices, particularly in how it confronts epistemic and moral issues like dehumanisation. Drawing on insights from media studies, I highlight recent studies on the troubling role journalism often plays in reinforcing dehumanising narratives about marginalised groups including refugees and asylum seekers. I contend that art, unlike journalism, is distinctly well-placed to counteract these narratives through its experiential and emotional dimensions. By doing so, art can disrupt the epistemic barriers created by dehumanising media, making a significant and original contribution to our collective political understanding. Whilst journalism inevitably plays a central role in our understanding of events like the refugee crisis, artworks can supply vital experiential and affective information that easily gets lost in standard news reporting. In this way, I suggest that art is not only relevant but indispensable to the broader discourse on justice and human dignity.

The London Aesthetics Forum (LAF) is a Forum of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. With lectures on topics in aesthetics and philosophy of art, LAF aims to stimulate philosophical reflection on art. Our events are free and open to all.

View our programme of events, sign up for the newsletter, or browse our archives and podcasts.

Now available, episodes of Aesthetics Bites, a collaboration between the London Aesthetics Forum and Philosophy Bites (made possible by a grant from the British Society of Aesthetics).

We are generously sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics