Mette Mortensen

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Copenhagen

Building on the vast research conducted on war and media since the 1970s, scholars are now studying the digital transformation of the production of news. Little scholarly attention has been paid, however, to non-professional, eyewitness visuals, even though this genre holds a still greater bearing on the way conflicts are fought, communicated, and...

This article proposes the term ‘connective witnessing’ to designate the prevalent form of witnessing today that combines personalized political participation and connective action in the recording and sharing of visual documentation. Connective witnessing manifests itself in various situations, prompting the production and distribution of eyewitnes...

The aim of this article is to outline celebrity selfies as a photographic genre and means of self-expression within celebrity culture. In the theoretical framework, we approach celebrity selfies on three distinct levels. First, the article elaborates on the concept of celebrification in order to set the cultural context for celebrity selfies. The s...

New and social media are increasingly used to raise issues of global justice. Images and texts representing distant suffering in an emotionally charged way involve users of social media in debates about ethical standards and moral responsibility. This raises the question of how social media users react to such evidence about instances of distant su...

Battles over who holds authority to speak on health issues have been recurrent since the outbreak of Covid-19. This article investigates how the voices of alt. health influencers have been handled within the news-mediated public sphere during the pandemic. Alt. health influencers illustrate how new forms of authority are claimed and negotiated on s...

This article studies perpetrator livestreams as an emerging witnessing genre in today’s digital media circuit. Perpetrator livestreams challenge the norms of witnessing by undermining the ethos traditionally associated with testimonies. They also challenge the forms of witnessing by being integral to the attacks and disseminated across media. Combi...

This special issue emphasizes memes as an avenue for researching vernacular expressions of the political. Memes disrupt and reimagine politics in humorous ways. Spreading across platforms, they confirm, contest and challenge political power and hierarchies. In this introduction, we contend that playfulness connects the humorous and the political in...

When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global health crisis in early 2020, memes of populist political leaders were disseminated in abundance on social media. At first sight, these political memes satirized and exposed the hazardous actions, appearances and communicative strategies of the populist leaders in this unforeseen situation that not only...

Fear needs dealing with. Fear demands to be abated, countered or turned into something else, contributing and curtailing how we ‘do’ being human beings. This special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies addresses fear within media and popular culture, adopting a cultural studies approach to fear in a variety of socio-cultural and polit...

This article studies the virality and assigned iconicity of visual icons by examining the roles and interplays between photographers and other media actors contributing to early phases of making and sharing the Omran Daqneesh images from Aleppo, 2016. We draw on theoretical frameworks concerning the mobilization of iconic imagery in today’s digital...

In recent years, the terrorist network Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has generated what might be referred to as a ‘spectacle of fear’ through strategic dissemination of execution videos and other graphic material. In response, social media users, activists and others circulate ‘counter-spectacles’, attempting to circumvent Islamic State of Iraq a...

In this article, we propose de-celebrification as a term in celebrity studies to designate celebrities losing legitimacy to inhabit the public role and possess the formal and symbolic power formerly attached to their celebrity status. De-celebrification does not refer to celebrities acting scandalously, as scandalous performances often play out wit...

With the emergence of digital media—and not least mobile media and social media—the eyewitness has gained renewed prominence. The eyewitness has moved behind the camera, and eyewitness images are mass produced and disseminated across platforms. Witnessing invariably raises questions about visibility and recognition: Who is seen, why are they seen,...

This article studies the work and working conditions of local non-professional or semi-professional photographers in Aleppo 2016, and the way they manoeuvre in relation to international networks of journalists and editors as well as to Western norms of portraying distant suffering when seeking to reach global audiences. Theoretically, the article d...

This article studies the conditions for covering terrorists in the post-factual era. Specifically, the article focuses on what it means when the news media show images of terrorists or deprive them of media attention. Regardless of whether the news media apply self-censorship in coverage of terrorists, the implications of their decision can be link...

This article addresses the ways in which terrorists are rendered visible in the news media. By studying images used in coverage of terrorists, the article focuses on the visual construction of this figure, which symbolizes the public’s notion of the “enemy”, in terms of specific attacks and the general threat thereof as well as terrorist actors, ne...

This article investigates selected newspapers’ editorial mediations over contrasting perceptions regarding the significance of a controversial set of ‘iconic’ news photographs, namely images of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee, whose drowned corpse washed ashore in September, 2015. Specifically, this study examined individual editorial i...

This article argues that appropriations are central to the production and reception of visual icons: appropriations are instrumental in iconization processes as they confirm and consolidate the iconic status by recycling the image in question. Moreover, appropriations are vital to their reception as they help shape and delimit the publics and disco...

Easy internet access and ubiquitous smart phones have augmented the number of images produced and accelerated the speed by which they are circulated (and likely also forgotten). By contrast to the great quantity of pictures disseminated in today’s connective media, a few photographs gain momentum and are declared to be “icons”. They stand out from...

Medialisering er blevet et centralt begreb til at forstå mediernes samspil med kultur og samfund. Medierne spiller en voksende rolle inden for stadigt flere områder lige fra politik til familieliv. I takt hermed ændres betingelserne for menneskers kommunikation og indbyrdes interaktion, ligesom sociale relationer og organisationsformer påvirkes. D...

https://www.routledge.com/News-Across-Media-Production-Distribution-and-Consumption/Jensen-Mortensen-rmen/p/book/9781138911734

The proliferation of camera phones over the past decade has created an unprecedented landslide of visual information in the online public sphere, transforming the form and amount of communication in relation to crisis events. International research on this subject has primarily centered on the way in which the production and dissemination of eyewit...

This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and convergent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemination within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well...

Paparazzi photography presently constitutes the largest genre of visual celebrity news on the internet along with red carpet photography. With the emergence of digital media, this genre has moved towards the centre of mainstream news and entertainment culture, and the content has undergone a significant transformation. Trademark paparazzi photograp...

This book assesses how Clint Eastwood’s diptych of films about the battle over Iwo Jima reflects war today. It highlights the fact that, with Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Eastwood made a unique contribution to film history, being the first director to make two films about the same event (together these works tell th...

While recent studies have engaged critically with the publication of news on multiple platforms, and the competition to mainstream media from non-traditional online news platforms, scholars have devoted less attention to the changes brought about to the production of news by the host of online sources becoming available for journalism. This article...

The article discusses the current rise of citizen photojournalism, which has received little scholarly scrutiny. Drawing on a case study of the mobile telephone footage of the Iranian woman Neda Agha Soltan, who was killed during a demonstration in Iran in June 2009, the article investigates the ethical dilemmas of the Western news media’s eager us...