This book studies how social stigma and prejudice can be reduced through factual media, including documentaries, news, reality TV, advertisements and social media videos. It is intended for researchers and media makers who want to increase social inclusion and diversity through strategic on-screen representations. Using models from social psychology, media studies and cultural studies, it explains how harmful social boundaries can be reduced in relation to ethnicity, culture, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion and many other social categories.
The first part explains the function of stereotypes in social perception and cognition, whether we meet a person in real life or watch a TV documentary. The second part establishes a classification system for stigmatising media stereotypes, and it proposes a methodology to analyse these in narrative and audio-visual representations. The third part introduces a framework of methods to reduce stigmatising stereotypes and foster social inclusion. These are based on experiencing the perspective of screen characters and the strategic intersection of multiple social identities.