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[ecrea] Workshop: New Media, Image War and the War on Terror (Swansea University, 24 June 2011)

Tue Feb 01 21:09:18 GMT 2011



New Media, Image War and the War on Terror







Workshop: Swansea University, June 24, 2011



Co-organized by Dr. Nathan Roger and Dr. Lee Jarvis

Hosted by the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University

Co-sponsored by The Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict, Power and Empire and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Politics (C-SCAP) at Swansea University and the British International Studies Association (BISA) Art and Politics Working Group

Supported by the BISA International Communication Working Group







Keynote Address



Dr. Andrew Hill (The Open University)

The War on Terror, World War I and Lepanto: Three Scopic Economies



**********





Introduction



The September 11, 2001 terror attacks signalled the start of a war on terror, it also marked a paradigm shift in warfare: from techno-war? which dominated the post-Cold War period ? to image war. The opening up of this new image war theatre of war has to date largely been overlooked by militaries as they have instead decided to focus their attention on reworking techno-war for the new security challenges of global terrorist war. This situation is also replicated within academia as many academics have chosen to rework techno-war for the war on terror. However, it is not sufficient to merely rework techno-war for image war as this new theatre of war requires that new strategies be developed in order to correctly understand it. A growing number of IR and Visual Culture theorists are now beginning to theorise image war and this workshop will bring together academics from these different backgrounds to further develop theory on image war.



The war on terror is simultaneously also taking place in a new media ecology ? participatory media ? and this, similar to image war, is also impacting on contemporary war. A number of academics, in IR and Media Studies, are currently engaged in theorising the impact of new media on the war on terror. However, the link between new media and image war is an area which is relatively under theorised and as such warrants further investigation. This workshop will bring together academics engaged in research about the impacts of new media on the war on terror with academics who are concerned with image war in the war on terror and it will encourage a cross-fertilisation of ideas between IR, Media Studies and Visual Culture. The result being, a more sophisticated understanding of the new security challenges currently posed by global terrorist war in an age of image war and ongoing new media revolution.





This workshop will build on the established research programmes of the BISA Art and Politics and International Communication Working Groups ? including past Workshops (?Art, War & Terror? at St. Anthony?s College, Oxford in November 2009), a Special Section ?Art, Politics, Purpose? edited by Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle in Review of International Studies 35(4) October 2009 and a Conference ?Terrorism and New Media: Building a Research Network? at Dublin City University in September 2010.





The BISA Art and Politics Working Group have made available 8 travel bursaries of £50 each for graduate students who wish to attend this workshop. If you would like to be considered for a travel bursary please email Dr. Nathan Roger (<mailto:(n.roger /at/ swansea.ac.uk)>(n.roger /at/ swansea.ac.uk)) with your name, University, level of study and also the name of the place you will be travelling to Swansea from. The deadlines is Monday 4th April 2011 and successful applicants will be contacted after this date.





Programme





9.00-9.30         ? Arrive / Registration





9.30-10.00       ? Welcome and Introductory Remarks





10.00-11.30     ? Keynote: Dr. Andrew Hill (The Open University)

?The War on Terror, World War I and Lepanto: Three Scopic Economies?





11.30-12.00     ? Coffee





12.00-13.00     ? Dr. Philip Hammond (London South Bank University)

                        ?Image War: Causes, Conduct and Consequences?





13.00-14.00     ? Lunch





14.00-15.30     ? Annie Bryan (PhD Student, Swansea University)

?Televising Terror: (New) Media Images in 7/7?s Live Coverage and Commemoration?



? Ian Jackson (PhD Student, Lancaster University)

?Image War and the Blogosphere: Does the Increasing Ubiquity of New Media Vectors Necessitate a Paradigm Shift in the Way Traditional Media Forms War??





15.30-16.00     ? Coffee





16.00-17.00     ? Professor Gillian Youngs (University of Wales, Newport)

?New Media in Historical Context: Communication and the Politics of Space in Warfare?





17.00-17.15     ? Concluding Remarks







Abstracts and Biographies





Annie Bryan



Televising terror: (New) media images in 7/7?s live coverage and commemorations



The occurrence of the London bombings on 7th July 2005 (?7/7?) marked a new chapter in the so-called ?War on Terror?. The four blasts on the city?s transport network triggered carnage of an unprecedented nature, as fifty-two people were killed and more than seven hundred injured in Britain?s first suicide bombings. This paper examines the ways in which the attacks, as well as their subsequent commemorations, were mediated in British television news coverage. Particular analytical attention is paid to the images which were used to represent, and to remember, 7/7.



This work is part of a larger interdisciplinary project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, which explores how traumatic events (in this case, 7/7) are mediated and later commemorated on television, and how they subsequently come to be remembered by the public. Data comprises 11 hours of video-recorded, transcribed footage from five British TV channels, including both live coverage of the attacks (5.5 hours) and coverage of their first-year anniversary commemorations (5.5 hours). References are also made to data collected on the fourth- and fifth- year anniversaries.



The method adopted is discourse analysis, specifically a critical semiotic approach (see Kress 2010). The key tenet of such an approach is that all discourses are multimodal, and so analyses should strive to account for all the semiotic modes at work within the data. Correspondingly, the paper examines the images within the coverage as well as the complex ways in which they interact with the verbal and sonic modes inherent to the medium of television.



The paper seeks to conduct comparative analyses of the images used to represent 7/7 in the commemorative reportage vis-à-vis those which featured in the breaking news coverage. To this end, it explores such questions as: what kind of images were used to represent the bombings? Which of these images were re-used (or not) in the commemorative reportage? How did images contribute to the remembrance of 7/7, and how did this change as further anniversaries of the attacks came to be marked?



To address these issues, a range of image types are considered. A major focus is the use of mobile media footage (both moving and still images) within the corpora. I examine how such material, as a form of ?new? participatory media, was embedded within the television coverage (an ?old? medium). Consideration is also given to the nature of the footage that was specially (re)produced to reconstruct the events of 7/7, especially in the context of witness? personal memories of the atrocity. The paper reflects upon the ideological factors underpinning these practices, and considers their implications for the ways in which terrorist acts are mediated and remembered. In so doing, it contributes to understandings of the nexus of image warfare, memory and media, and highlights the interpenetration of ?new? and ?old? media therein.



REFERENCES



Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London, Routledge.





Annie Bryan is a final year PhD student in the Department of Language and Literature at Swansea University. Her thesis employs multimodal discourse analysis to examine the role of television news coverage in mediating and memorialising traumatic events, using the 2005 London bombings as a case study. She has recently published, with Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, an article in Discourse and Communication on the recontextualisation of mobile media footage in the live coverage and commemorations of 7/7.





Dr. Philip Hammond



Image War: Causes, Conduct and Consequences



Several scholars have drawn attention to the importance of image and presentation to contemporary ?mediatised? conflict. So far, however, there seems to be little consensus on how far, and in what ways, this differs from the past, nor on what has given rise to the phenomenon of ?image war?. This paper proposes that image war is primarily a political phenomenon: that is to say, it is driven less by developments in media technology and culture, and more by attempts on the part of Western elites to simulate a political project for the post-Cold War era.



Discussing examples from the ?humanitarian? interventions of the 1990s as well as the ?war-on-terror? actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the paper examines the difficulties encountered by political and military leaders in conducting image wars. Successes have been few in number, usually only short-lived, and rarely uncontested. A case in point is Iraq, where despite the coalition?s careful efforts to construct the ?defining? image of the campaign (thought to have been achieved in the toppling of Saddam?s statue), the equally enduring image of the conflict is the scenes of torture and degradation in Abu Ghraib prison.



Such difficulties point to the fact that the consequences of image war are unpredictable and difficult to control. In this light, a number of features of contemporary media can be understood as shaping the uncertain ground on which image wars are fought. The paper briefly examines four such factors: high levels of popular media literacy, the manipulability of digital images, the culture of Web 2.0, and the development of transnational audiences for global news media.



However, while there are important developments in the contemporary mediascape, these do not in themselves explain the rise of image war. Rather, they can be understood as symptoms of the same underlying development that gives rise to image war itself ? namely, the absence of those larger frameworks of political meaning which collapsed with the end of the Cold War.



This helps to explain the domestic orientation of image war: although it is played out on the international stage, the most important audiences are at home. If the popular disengagement from politics and the hollowing-out of public life that have troubled Western societies in the post-Cold War era provide the impetus for engaging in image war, however, these underlying problems also limit its success. In these circumstances, waging image war tends to be counter-productive and self-defeating, encouraging media self-consciousness and public cynicism.





Philip Hammond is Reader in Media and Communications at London South Bank University. He is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity (Routledge, 2007) and Framing Post-Cold War Conflicts (Manchester University Press, 2007), and is co-editor, with Edward Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press, 2000). In September 2010 he organised ?Screens of Terror?, an international conference on representations of war and terrorism since 9/11 in film, TV drama and documentary.





Dr. Andrew Hill



The War on Terror, World War I and Lepanto: three scopic economies



This paper will seek to delineate what is distinctive about the role played by imagery and digital technology in the War on Terror by locating this conflict in regard to two previous moments in the evolving relationship between war and the visual: the Battle of Lepanto (1571, an exemplar from the pre-photographic era), and World War I (the age of photography).



Focusing upon the connections between the first person, embodied experience of the act of seeing and developments in visual technology, the paper will assess the role played by seeing in each of these conflicts in regard to: a) how wars are fought (?in the battlefield?); b) how conflicts are encountered and made sense of by publics.



Introducing the notion of a ?scopic economy? the paper will trace the shifts in how the act of seeing has been organised and distributed in each conflict. In so doing it will evaluate what is specifically new and distinctive about the role played by digital imagery and new media in the War on Terror, and what the ramifications of these changes are for this and future conflicts.





Andrew Hill is Research Fellow in Visual Culture, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), The Open University. He is the author of Re-Imagining the War on Terror: Seeing, Waiting, Travelling (Palgrave, 2009).





Ian Jackson



Image war and the Blogosphere: Does the increasing ubiquity of new media vectors necessitate a paradigm shift in the way traditional media frames war?



Daniel Hallin?s model of media collusion centred on spheres of consensus, legitimate controversy and deviance focused almost entirely on domestic media consumption; one nation?s consensus is another?s deviance.



But what of the blogosphere? As a truly global media vector and with usage having increased by 444.8% in the last decade the homogenous support of the domestic media has become diluted.



The elegant British solution to the perceived damage a hostile media did to America?s efforts in Vietnam; to embed journalists within the naval task force during the Falkland?s war was repeated in both Gulf Wars. And yet it?s effectiveness as a solution was certainly diminished by 2003 when bloggers from all over the world voiced dissent on a public forum. This paper will attempt to examine some of the issues around the way new media vectors have transformed the media management of war, discuss whether access to new technologies has rendered the ?embedding? solution moribund and assess whether the ability of networks like Fox News to frame conflict in a manner both politically and militarily palatable to the elite has remained undiminished. The paper will challenge preconceived notions about the changes taking place in new media by drawing both from contemporary literature and direct interviews with important and high profile bloggers such as Faiz Shakir.





Ian Jackson previously studied Journalism at Murdoch University in Western Australia and is currently writing his PhD within the Media Department at Lancaster University. He is a founding member of Lancaster University?s Art/Terror/ Politics reading group, a successful columnist and some time guest speaker for the Skeptics (sic) society.





Professor Gillian Youngs



New Media in Historical Context: Communication and the Politics of Space in Warfare



This paper focuses on the relationships between new media shifts in communication patterns and processes and long term thinking about the politics of space and warfare. It opens up a number of themes related to communication that have been commonplace in the historical study of international relations and may well be worth revisiting in the context of the contemporary ?war on terror?. The paper includes critical reflection on the implications of limited focus on technological and sociotechnical factors in IR and the benefits of engaging insights from international communications and globalization studies.



The arguments link debates about the influences of uses and functions of new media to well established critiques of state-centrism and territorially-bound conceptions of ?inside? and ?outside? in traditional approaches to sovereignty and security. The paper explores the extent to which contemporary communications test established concepts of the state and identities associated with it. The new media environment and the diversity of information flows within it challenge familiar notions of the state and its potential for control, as the Wikileaks revelations of US military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq graphically demonstrate.



The paper works with a fresh approach to the politics of space developed by the author in relation to the global economy and digital developments. This perspective argues for a focus on ?sociospatial? (virtual online) environments as well as the ?geospatial? (physical offline) environments and the linkages and tensions across them. There is a new complexity involved in thinking about the politics of space and communications flows, networks and actors, and issues linked to different forms of authority or influence. IR as a discipline has to date made limited progress in such directions.



The paper argues that there are well established and new reasons for this and both are worthy of examination to shape IR as a discipline fit for purpose in the 21st century. These reasons highlight the reluctance of IR in general to give prominence to sociotechnical analysis and to integrate the related insights of communications and new media studies on the changing nature of political processes and contexts.



The specific and enduring nature of the ?war on terror? and new research related to it have illuminated this problem and laid out lessons that need to be learned to expand the analytical reach and policy relevance of academic work in IR. The discipline has always had interdisciplinary characteristics at its heart and this is among its strengths but this paper argues that some of these interdisciplinary parameters now need to be stretched in fundamental ways that may not be sufficiently clear to date.





Gillian Youngs has recently been appointed to a University of Wales Alliance Research Chair. She is Professor of Digital Economy and Academic Director at the Institute of Advanced Broadcasting, University of Wales, Newport. She will be leading an ESRC Research Seminar Series ?Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights? 2011-13 with colleagues from Universities of Leicester, Oxford and Leeds and she led an ESRC Research Seminar Series ?Ethics and the War on Terror: Politics, Multiculturalism and Media? with colleagues from Universities of Oxford and Birmingham 2006-9. Her publications include: International Relations in a Global Age (Polity, 1999); Global Political Economy in the Information Age (Routledge, 2007); the edited volume Political Economy, Power and the Body (Macmillan, 2000); the co-edited volume Globalization: Theory and Practice (Continuum, 2008), first published in 1996 and now in its third edition. She is currently completing Virtual Globalization: Digital Economy (Routledge). Her recent publications on the war on terror include: ?The ?new home front? and the War on Terror: Ethical and Political Reframing of National and International Politics.? International Affairs 86(4) 2010, 925-937; ?Media and Mediation in the War on Terror: Issues and Challenges.? Critical Studies on Terrorism 2009 2(1), 1-8; ?Cosmopolitanism and Feminism in the Age of the War on Terror: A Twenty-first Century Reading of Virginia Woolf?s Three Guineas?. In M. Nowicka and M. Rovisco (eds) Cosmopolitanism in Practice. Farnham: Ashgate. 2009, 145-159.

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