TvFIGURES · Fatness and/in Greek Television Fiction (1989-2024): Representation, Production, and Audience Engagement

Across Europe and beyond, debates on body politics are being reshaped by fat scholarship, fat acceptance movements, and feminist and queer alliances. These initiatives challenge harmful stereotypes, highlight the circulation of anti-fat discourses in media, and call for structural change. Yet, most of this work is rooted in Anglophone contexts, leaving Southern Europe underexplored. TvFIGURES brings this agenda to Greece, a country with high levels of fat prevalence and a centralised television industry with a long record of controversial portrayals of fat bodies. The project investigates how Greek TV fiction has represented fat bodies, how audiences interpret these portrayals, and how industry professionals explain their production. By combining these three perspectives, TvFIGURES develops the first integrated framework for understanding “televisual fatness regimes” in Europe. This approach moves beyond description, offering new theoretical insights and practical guidance for more inclusive media practices. The project’s findings will feed directly into EU debates on equality, diversity, and audiovisual regulation, with outputs including peer-reviewed articles, a special journal issue, a best-practice guide for media professionals, and policy briefs aimed at regulators. Hosted at the University of Amsterdam, TvFIGURES also strengthens the fellow’s career by providing advanced training, mentorship, and international networking. The fellow will receive training in focus group facilitation, with vulnerable groups, elite interviewing, and the management of complex audiovisual data. By integrating theoretical innovation with empirical depth, TvFIGURES will contribute to critical media studies, foreground European perspectives, and deliver findings with direct relevance for policy and community-engagement.