Angelos Kissas is an Assistant Professor and the Chair of the Department of Communications, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Deree-The American College of Greece, where he teaches courses on media and communication theory and political communication. Angelos has served as adviser for communication and head of social media to the President of the Hellenic Republic. Following the completion of his PhD in Media and Communication at the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, Angelos worked on an ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In his research, he has examined, among others, the media-related transformations of political parties’ ideology, the democratic ambivalence of populism in the digital age (postdoctoral project), and the social-mediated/platformized struggle over authentic and algorithmically worthy victimhood.
During his visit at the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, Angelos has worked on expanding on his postdoctoral project with the aim of bringing together three case studies of Digital Populism and is currently writing his first book on the topic – Twitter political populism, Instagram celebrity populism and YouTube protest populism. At the heart of this book lies the idea that populist actors, whether professional or amateur, make and share content through social media to pledge allegiance to a righteous “people” suffering popular injustice; the people-as-victim in urgent need for moral and political vindication. What do digital performances of victimhood add to our understanding of populism that traditional approaches to people-centric and anti-elite/establishment populist style, ideology, and discourse miss? How do different platforms serve to confront us with people-as-victims that look and feel authentic, rendering them worthy of our attention, and who are they, in the context of mainstream, institutional-party politics but also extra-institutional, everyday politics? Are these multi-modal, inter-medial and trans-national “victimization technologies” amicable or toxic to liberal democracy? These are questions that Angelos’ research on Digital Populism addresses.
Angelos is also the Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Visual Political Communication and an active member of the Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association and the Political Communication Division of the International Association of Communication. For his research, he has been awarded grants by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, the Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council.