Good afternoon, Frank. And I am delighted to be here and join this anger fest. I am delighted to be in a room full of angry and laughing people. So it’s wonderful to see you all. And today I want to talk specifically, there’s a bit of an issue with the screen on the right hand side. So today I want to talk specifically about the role of anger in mediated politics. And what I mean by that is what happens when people are angry in public and what does it mean. So I’ve been working on the relationship between emotions, media and politics for the better part of the last decade. And in fact, I put out the book Emotions, Media and Politics last year. It is for sale in the bookstore downstairs. Great present for Valentine’s Day. The lovely woman in the bookshop assures me that it looks really interesting. So I’ve written about these issues around emotions, media and politics for some time, including a range of different emotions ranging from love to anger and hatred. And I would say that I’m not a very angry person. I mean, I have my moments, but we all do. But in general, I’m not a very angry person. However, I have found anger to be a really crucial political emotion. It’s increasingly prominent in public debates. And it’s also an emotion that has the capacity to bring about social change. So I’ve ended up doing a lot of work on anger. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. I want to make the argument, first of all, that anger is an essential political emotion. And I want to suggest that there’s something distinctive about mediated anger or the kind of anger that we see in the media. And that’s different from the kind of anger that circulates in our individual bodies. I want to talk about mediated anger as a particularly powerful resource for political actors, something that can be used for better and for worse and has the potential to bring about social change. Something that also needs to be used with great caution. Now there’s always been this kind of a interesting tension on one hand between the need to involve citizens as rational and constructive participants in the political process. And then on the other hand, the need to control what is seen as the irrational passions and the anger of the common people. So a fear of emotion, I would suggest, is often in fact a fear of anger because angry people when they get together are seen as being potentially dangerous. So we tend to be afraid of crowds because we are afraid of the anger of crowds. Anger is feared because it comes from this irrationality of groups gathered together. And that is seen as potentially uncontrollable, aggressive and violent. But at the same time, social scientists tend to be in broad agreement that to a great extent political participation is motivated by emotional engagement. That is to say people participate because they care or they feel passionately about an issue so that instead of being driven by rationality, citizens who participate appear to be fueled by passion and by emotions ranging from love to hatred and anger. If we look at anger specifically, anger has long been recognized by political and social scientists as an important political emotion. And it comes to matter politically when it’s articulated by groups of people, by collectives towards a shared objective of addressing an injustice. So I’ve done a study of anger in routine coverage of protest and that basis created what I call a typology of anger. We are describing how anger works when we see it represented in the media. And what I’ve suggested is that first of all, anger as it circulates in public is performative. It’s something that is based on the performance of actors usually towards particular strategic goals and often ideologically motivated. Secondly, it’s discursively constructed. What I mean by that is that it is something that we speak about through narratives. And then finally, it is usually collective and political. It’s based on the articulation of shared grievances, things that we are angry about together, usually towards particular political ends. So in that sense, it’s a powerful tool for communicators but also one that needs to be used with great care because it’s potentially explosive. Now a lot of observers suggest that anger is actually increasingly prominent as a kind of dominant emotion when we talk in public. So for instance, a post-colonial theorist, Pankaj Mishra, has talked about how we’re seeing a global age of anger. I found the work of the historian William Reddy particularly helpful to understand this. He speaks about the notion of an emotional regime. And what he means by talking about an emotional regime is a notion of dominant ways of talking about emotions in public. And I would suggest that the media, including traditional and social media, are key way of enacting the emotional regime of speaking about our emotions in public. What I’ve suggested in my work is that in the contemporary regime or in the contemporary era what we’re seeing is an emotional regime of angry populism, exemplified by our very good friend Donald Trump. And indeed, a lot of observers suggest that there has been a kind of shift in the emotional regime. So there’s evidence to suggest that the recent past has seen an emphasis on emotional regimes around hope. So we have the iconic Barack Obama Hope poster. And before that, Bill Clinton was, in fact, the man from Hope. He was from Hope, Arkansas. By contrast, if we look at Donald Trump, his slogan, Make America Great Again, is one that is quite positive and embodies hope and the idea of the possibility of change. But that has consistently been accompanied by angry rents about the present, which appear to resonate with disaffected angry voters. Now with that in mind, I’ve previously made the argument based on several studies of media coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency that Trump embodies a new form of populism, what I call angry populism. And a lot of observers suggest that Donald Trump might have an anger problem. This is an old article from Newsweek. But this has kind of been a theme throughout his presidency. And angry populism is based on a way of talking about politics which seeks broad appeal through the deliberate expression of anger. By doing so, Trump gives voice to the grievances of his supporters. And when this angry populism is taken seriously in media coverage, what it suggests is that the anger of Donald Trump, but also that of his supporters and people protesting against him, that these forms of anger are salient and relevant to political life. Now a lot of people across the political spectrum think that Donald Trump is unique and special in certain ways. And that might be the case, but actually Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. His success is tied to broader sets of trends around the world representing the rise of populist leaders. So populist leaders have seen huge electoral advances around the world. And what these populist movements share, despite their diversity, I should say not all populists are men. Some of the most prominent ones are, but there are female populists as well. But what they share is a mobilization of a disenchanted electorate fed up with a political establishment. And that in turn perpetuates angry ways of talking in public. Oh, I seem to have lost some of my slides here. Okay. There we are. Thank you. So what we saw is that angry speech is not just about words. Angry populism has created a climate that opens up for criminal actions against those who are marked out as the enemies of the in-group. Often immigrants and ethnic and sexual minorities. So statistics show that 2016 represented a five-year high in reported hate crimes with a particularly significant surge immediately following the presidential election. We saw similar patterns in the UK following on from the Brexit referendum in 2016, which also relied very heavily on anti-immigration rhetoric. And even though spikes tend to be linked to particular political events, the incidents has grown around the world. These are statistics from major US cities, but we see global tends reflecting a rise in hate crimes ever since about 2015 and going forward. But given what we know about anger, it should come as no surprise that they are not merely a tool of political opportunists and populists, but also a tool for protesters who seek to bring about progressive social change. And research and coverage of protest has often assumed that angry protesters are portrayed negatively. But my research and that of others more recently suggested that is actually far from true in contemporary media coverage. In fact, when protesters are portrayed as angry, that is, anger is often portrayed as legitimate as a way of explaining their grievances. Increasingly, anger is a kind of mobilizing emotion. In the contemporary emotional regime, a good citizen is an angry citizen who uses anger to bring about social change. So what I’ve argued today is that anger is a tool that can be used for better and for worse. It’s frequently and increasingly a tool of political opportunists and populists. But it also remains a resource for those who seek social change from the bottom up. At the same time, it’s a resource that is essential for communicators to harness sparingly and responsibly, given its power to both unite and divide. Thank you.