The rhetoric of celebrity humanitarianism: the case study of Lesvos

Celebrities participate in performances from the zones of suffering in order to trigger emotions to their audiences and engage them in such causes. In this combination of critical discourse analysis and rhetoric analysis, the author analyses four cases of celebrities: Angelina Jolie, Mandy Patinkin, a group of actors form the popular series Game of Thrones and Susan Sarandon who visited refugee camps in the island of Lesvos to see the conditions under which, the refugees were living. The combination of those methods with Chouliaraki’s (2013) work on humanitarian celebrities and Goffman’s (1959) work about the presentation of the self in everyday life, is used to unveil how celebrities communicate and use their political power in order to evoke participation in the global north.