Now available as Open Access: "Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming" by Verena Straub

The book ‘Affective Formation of Publics’, edited by Margreth Lünenborg and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, has been published as open access. The texts, including the essay "Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming" by Verena Straub, can be read and downloaded on the publisher's website.

In her essay ‘Contested Image Practices of Public Shaming,’ Verena Straub examines the practice of shaming and dehumanising political opponents and the role of images in this context, as well as the further processing of images into counter-movements and the resulting process of memefication of the image material. She addresses the necessity of media reception of image material, the aesthetics that arise in this context, and the necessary technical infrastructure. Straub examines this using the images taken and distributed in 2010 of Eden Abergil, a former Israeli soldier who posed in front of Palestinian prisoners. The posts that Abergil published on her Facebook profile were uploaded with the text ‘Israel Defence Forces, the best days of my life’. This post was noticed by many people and reworked in various ways to address the dehumanising practices of the photographs.