This book is the first comprehensive collection to address victimhood through the lens of mediatised politics and culture. Across different countries and contexts, it explores how media and mediated communication shape public awareness, affects, and emotions in debates about victimhood, and how victimhood is claimed and wielded in discourse to communicate political demands.
Questions of who deserves empathy, visibility, support and redress have become defining issues of this moment. Amid the rise of identity politics, the rhetoric of suffering and pain has become omnipresent across mass media, platforms and websites, driving competing identity formation around genuine and perceived victimhood. 
The seventeen chapters examine how victimhood identities are (re)produced in a European context through news, alternative media, online communities and immersive media by journalists, activists, politicians, far-right movements and victims themselves. They show how victimhood is used to define the good and the bad in polarised societies, often setting those who suffer against one another rather than bridging social divides.
Offering original conceptual and empirical insights, this timely volume makes an important contribution to contemporary academic and public debates, helping readers navigate the evolving role of victimhood in mediatised politics and culture.

Manuel Menke is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interests comprise (theories of) social and media change, mediated memory and nostalgia, mediated affect and emotion, digital public spheres, and journalism.

Gabriela Ferreira is a researcher at the Department of Communication at NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a Ph.D. candidate at the same university. With 12 years of journalism experience, her research focuses on the impacts of newsrooms' innovation practices on the well-being and mental health of media workers.