Visualising War and Peace

In this week's episode, Alice interviews Dr David LaRocca, a philosopher by training but also an author and expert on cinema. Among other publications, he has edited volumes on the Philosophy of Documentary Film and on the Philosophy of War Films. In his book Metacinema: the form and content of filmic reference and reflexivity he discusses the self-conscious representation of different kinds of violence and conflict in film; and his recent research has paid particular attention to the affective elements of war films, as well as wrestling with big questions like ‘what is a war film?’ and ‘what are war films for?’

In his introduction to The Philosophy of War Films, David wrote: ‘it is largely through the camera, both through its lens and by means of cinematic form, that what many of us know about war is known, especially what we know visually and sonically…’  In the podcast, we discuss how films mediate our understanding of many aspects of war, and the very complex relationship between narrative and reality. David discusses changing trends in the cinematic representation of war, particularly as they have been affected by advances in technology. We reflect on the economics of the film industry and its implications for diversity and homogeneity of representation, and we also talk about the ways in which specific, real-life conflicts have driven developments in cinema.

David has fascinating things to say about why we watch war films, not just once but often, on repeat. He explains the concept of the 'humanistic sublime': the vicarious experience of extreme peril without real, bodily-danger. We talk about how 'narratively satisfying' stories of conflict often are, in contrast to some narratives of conflict resolution and peace-building. And we discuss the immersive, emotive qualities of (e.g.) slow cinema relative to high-speed processing of rapid changes of scene. 

David also gets us thinking about differences between dystopian and utopian representations of war and peace on the big screen. Along the way, we touch on a huge variety of trends in cinema, from documentary to anime, superhero movies to parody. As David points out, many films show self-awareness of the ways in which they influence and rework others, canonising some iconic images of war but also inviting us to question habits of representation.   

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

This week’s podcast continues our mini-series on visualising war through gaming. Alice and Nicolas’s guest is Dr Katarina Birkedal, who holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews; her thesis is entitled ‘Resistance, Reproduction, Attachment: Unsettling gender through cosplay.’ Until 2021, Katarina was postdoctoral Research fellow on the Visualising War project. Drawing on literature, theory, and methodology from diverse fields, from archaeology to film studies, her research explores the role of stories in politics, whether they be those told in popular culture, the history lessons taught in school, or the narrative of world order presented by theories. As the title of her thesis reveals, Katarina has a special interest in cosplay, which she also pursues actively herself. 

Cosplay, and what it can tell us about representations of war and violence, is, not surprisingly, one of the topics that we discuss with Katarina on the show. But that is not all. Among the topics we explore with her, are

–      how (childhood) stories shape our memories of wars, even when those wars happened a long time before we were born

–      how stories in various media and popular culture, including cosplay, reflect and influence ideas about conflict

–      how active involvement in cultural practices such as cosplay is a chance to challenge dominating, often stereotypical narratives of conflict

–      conflict and gender roles, in popular culture, cosplay and beyond

–      the militarisation of popular culture in Norway and Britain

–      cultures of memorialisation: what is remembered and how, and what isn’t, and why

–      boundaries between stories and reality

–      how representations of war and conflict in popular culture might shape our ideas of the future of warfare

We hope you enjoy the episode!
 
 For a version of our podcast with close captions, please go to our YouTube channel. You can find out more about Dr Katarina Birkedal’s work on her website at the Centre for Arts and Politics at the University of St Andrews. Be sure also to check out Katarina’s blog posts on the Visualising War website.

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
 Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, our postdoctoral research assistant Katarina Birkedal (2020-21) interviews Taliesin and Evitel, the couple behind the YouTube and Twitch channels of the same name. They offer commentary on the game World of Warcraft, as well as giving regular news updates on everything related to the game. Through a combination of humour and deep dive analyses, they enrich their viewers’ experience and understanding of the game, drawing on their backgrounds as an actor and an art historian to pick apart the references and narrative devices the game uses to tell its story.

Taliesin and Evitel’s YouTube channel has 293 000 subscribers at the time of recording, and their Twitch channel has more than 83 000 followers. Their content has been viewed 69 million times. They have also hosted live events for Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft. More recently, they have expanded their content to include analyses of film and TV as well as commentary on the game Final Fantasy XIV.

You can find them on their YouTube channels – Taliesin & Evitel, T&E Talks, and Taliesin & Evitel TV – on their  Twitch channel, on Twitter, and on their website.

Please note that this episode was recorded before the state of California filed its lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for discrimination against female employees, including charges of sexual misconduct. For more information, please see Taliesin and Evitel's video on the topic: https://youtu.be/zqd1uAtqtTQ

In the episode, we discuss how war is visualised through immersive fantasy in the MMORGP World of Warcraft. We talk about how the game constructs agency and heroism in war, how allegiance and identity is used, how the aftereffects of war are depicted, and how redemption and reconciliation are presented.  Taliesin and Evitel reflect on how the game treats player choice and ethics in extreme situations, including the perpetration of what amounts to in-game war, and whether the game amounts to a commentary on the illusion of free will in warfare, or on how far a person is prepared to go on orders.

We reflect on how the game-world reflects the real-world attitudes of its creators, from the narrative construction of the two main factions – the Alliance and the Horde – as ‘steadfast’ and ‘savage’ respectively, to the treatment of the peoples that constitute them. From this, we discuss how our own experiences inform our readings of the game as players, and whether it is possible for the opposite to occur.  The conversation dives into many fascinating aspects of how we visualise war, in the real world and the game world - and how games and reality inform each other.

We hope you enjoy the episode! For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 
 
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this week’s podcast, Alice and Nicolas talk with Dr Iain Donald. Iain is a Senior Lecturer in Game Production at Abertay University. His research explores commemoration and memorialization in videogames and interactive media as well as the intersection of games, digital media and history. Iain is also a skilled developer of video games. He has been involved in several award-winning Applied Games projects, and has written and presented on creating and developing games for digital health, education, cybersecurity and social change. 

Among other topics, we discuss

–      the possibilities, limitations and challenges of representing war and battle in video games

–      the significance of historical accuracy in video games based on real conflicts

–      the complex interplay of technical, aesthetic, economic and historical interests in the creation of games

–      the ethical aspects of video gaming and player immersion, especially with regard to the representation of violence and injury

–      the risks, challenges and consequences of representing real-life wars, battles and conflicts in games 

–      the role and ethics of player agency

We hope you enjoy the episode!
 
 For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. You can find out more about Dr Iain Donald’s work on his website at Abertay University. For links to some of the games Iain mentions in the podcast, you can read this blog.

For more information about the Visualising War project, individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Roddy Brett, an expert on political violence and peacebuilding based at the University of Bristol. Roddy’s research looks at the causes and consequences of armed conflict, and how it shapes state institutions and societies more broadly. He also works on conflict resolution and transitional justice, and is the author/co-author of a number of books, including The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork, The Politics of Victimhood in Post-conflict Societies, and The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide: Political Violence in Guatemala.

He has worked a lot in Latin America, and more recently he has been looking at armed conflict in Ukraine, Myanmar, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, examining the legacies of armed conflict and the strategies which individuals and groups use to coexist in the aftermath of mass violence. Roddy is not just an academic: he has also worked for the United Nations and various NGOs on conflict analysis and conflict transformation. In Guatemala, for example, he was part of the team that prepared the investigation and brought evidence against former de facto president General Rios Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity, which resulted in his conviction in 2013. 

In the podcast, we discuss the language and categories used to define different kinds of political violence, the hierarchies we construct between them, and what difference they make to how perpetrators, victims, international observers and legal processes visualise and respond to conflict. Roddy talks us through the long process of investigating and redefining the political violence that took place in Guatemala from 1975 onwards, which was described by government supporters as 'brave counter-insurgency' but ultimately defined as involving acts of genocide, perpetrated against the Mayan population by the state. He reflects on the ongoing dissonance between how different sectors of Guatemalan society visualise and narrate the past, with implications for their future: different habits of remembering and describing what happened are further polarising an already polarised community. 

This gets us talking about peace and reconciliation processes, with Roddy reflecting on some of the ground-breaking aspects of the 2014 Colombian peace process. Rather than simply involving military actors, this involved civil society and gave victims a seat at the negotiating table. Combatants on both sides heard from a 'universe of victims'. Roddy compares this participatory approach with more 'top-down' peace processes, and we discuss the 'local turn' in sustainable peacebuilding and the 'spaces for encounter' which can engage emotions, break down conflict identities, 'deconstruct' or 'rehumanise' the enemy', overcome mistrust, and help people on all sides envision a more peaceful future. Roddy underlines the blurred line between 'peace' and 'conflict', as we consider the barriers to sustainable peacebuilding. And he talks about a project he is involved in which uses film as a tool to help individuals and communities look critically at their habits of visualising war and peace.

We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this episode Alice and Nicolas interview two University of St Andrews colleagues,  Prof. Anthony Lang Jr of the School of International Relations, and Dr Rory Cox, Senior Lecturer in the School of History. Tony’s research focuses on how politics, law and ethics intersect at the global level, with a particular emphasis on human rights, international obligations and the just war tradition. Rory’s research is centred on the ethics of war, the history of violence, and intellectual history, and he explores these topics with an impressively wide chronological range, including ancient Egyptian Just War doctrine, medieval military history, debates on the use of torture, and the history of terrorism.

In the podcast we discuss the different ways in which communities and individuals have visualised and articulated the complex relationship between war and justice. Tony and Rory talk us through some of the ideas associated with jus ad bellum (justifications for going to war), jus in bello (laws of conduct during war) and jus post bellum (the responsibilities that states/combatants might have in the aftermath of conflict). Rory stresses how varied different strands of thought within the Just War Tradition have been, taking us back into its deep history and challenging the myth that it is a product of purely 'Western' thinking. Rather than approaching it as a 'doctrine' (i.e. a set of principles that can be applied in any situation), he encourages us to think of the Just War Tradition as posing a set of important moral and ethical questions, to which there are no clear-cut or universal answers.

This gets us talking about storytelling - the narratives that individuals and states have told to 'justify' their involvement or behaviour in different conflicts. We discuss the visualisation involved in justifying means via ends, and Tony reflects on the relationship between justifications of war and the fairy tale tradition (invoking Tolkein's idea that all fairy tales are 'eucatastrophes': stories with happy endings which involve great peril along the way). Rory highlights the key role that language plays in colouring how 'just' or 'unjust' we think different conflicts are - and, indeed, how we conduct them. We consider the impact which Just War thinking (on the one hand) and the political justification of a conflict (on the other) can have on soldiers' sense of identity and behaviours. We also talk about the role played by law courts, the press, social media, the film industry and gaming in shaping public perceptions of jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum - and how public consensus in turn shapes the stories that policy-makers tell and the decisions they take.

As Tony and Rory stress, the Just War Tradition is deployed in culturally specific and highly subjective ways. It sometimes helps prevent conflict, or mitigates its impacts, or holds people to account afterwards; but it can also be manipulated by influential figures within a community to persuade others to visualise war (or 'resistance' or 'terrorism', or torture, or 'the enemy', or the prospect of peace) in particular, self-serving ways.

We hope you enjoy the discussion. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this week's episode, Alice interviews award-winning artist Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox. Kathryn started painting as a child, selling her first piece of art at just 14 years old, winning her first major art competition at 16, and holding her first exhibition at 17. She has since exhibited not just in her native Australia but in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, South Korea, Norway London and New York. Her art takes inspiration from nature and the cosmos, and in recent years she has focused particularly on the existential threats posed to us and our world by emerging technologies. This has led her to look at military technologies – something which she is exploring academically as well as artistically through a PhD. Kathryn uses the powerful analogue medium of painting to ask huge questions about new media, especially those that use the electromagnetic spectrum: a natural phenomenon which we can’t see with the naked eye but which many are using for commercial and/or coercive purposes. Fundamentally, her art is a powerful exercise in visualisation, inviting us to look deep into the past as well as the future, and to pay attention to phenomena that threaten our landscape and human existence. In particular, she focuses attention on the 'everywhere war': the increasing blurring of military and civilian technologies and activities, a development which challenges our long-established habits of visualising (and separating) 'war' and 'peace'.

In the podcast, Kathryn describes her approach as 'imaginational metaveillance' - a term she has come up with to capture the critical, analytical observations that her art performs by taking us to places we can only go in our imaginations and getting us to look critically at things we cannot physically see. In her paintings, she invites us to fly, so that we can look down from above earth's atmosphere, seeing natural clouds but also online/digital 'clouds' that swirl everywhere, and the invisible grids that criss-cross earth and sky, measuring our every move and harvesting our data.

Kathryn explains why she uses age-old symbols like the Tree of Life to help viewers connect with the whole span of human history as they visualise future threats and possibilities, both military and civilian - or a combination of the two. We discuss her artistic style, which draws readers in with lots of colour and beautiful aesthetics, and also the responses which viewers often have to her art: most are enthusiastic, until they look closely and grasp its worrying 'revelations' about the threats that lurk in our present and future.

This gets us talking about the impact which Kathryn wants to have with her art. Among other places, Kathryn has exhibited her art at the Australian Defence College, and she has enjoyed the many reflective conversations it has opened up with lots of different visitors. She believes that the critical and imaginative visions of past, present and future which art can prompt us to engage with have much to contribute to policy-making and strategic thinking, and she describes her own work as a form of quiet activism, opening up dialogue and inviting people to engage with big questions. 

We hope that our podcast conversation with Kathryn does exactly this for you! A blog with some of the images we discuss is available here, and listeners can find more examples and analysis of Kathryn's art on her blog. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

In this week's episode, Alice interviews three researchers - Teresa Ó Brádaigh Bean, Lydia Cole, and Azadeh Sobout - who are involved in the Art of Peace project based at the Universities of Manchester and Durham. Led by Oliver Richmond, Stephanie Kappler, and Birte Vogel, this project explores arts-based approaches to peace-making and the role that grassroots-led art projects can play in helping communities process and recover from conflict. 

On the podcast, we discussed the many different roles that different forms of artistic practice can play in post-conflict communities, from bringing people together and building bridges between past and present to rights-based activism and peaceful revolution.  Lydia, Azadeh and Teresa were all keen to stress that participatory arts programmes can help people 'build better futures', not just process past experiences. Along the way, we discussed the false binary between war and peace that often distorts and simplifies how we visualise both. We talked about the limitations of top-down, colonial-style peace-making initiatives, and the merits of grassroots peace-building from below and attention to micropolitics. We also looked at lots of different examples of 'artivism' - art that embodies and enables activism. Our conversation got us thinking about entrenched habits of visualising 'peace' and the role that different art forms can play in re-visualising both peace and conflict and in visualising new/different/better futures.

Alongside her research, Teresa works for the charity In Place of War, which supports artists and cultural organisations in places of conflict all around the world. Her recent work has focused particularly on creative enterprise, community arts education and arts-based social movements in Colombia, and she is co-editor of a volume coming out soon called ‘The Art of Making Something from Nothing’, which looks at the social impact of arts projects across the Global South.

Lydia is closely connected to the Conflict Textiles project which we talked about on the podcast last week, and she has curated a range of exhibitions in connection with this (called ‘Stitched Voices’ and ‘Threads, War and Conflict’), bringing feminist international relations theory and critical peace and conflict studies together. She is passionate about creative and participatory approaches to peace and conflict studies, and her work for the Art of Peace project has focused particularly on grassroots arts projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Azadeh has been leading a research project on the intersection of arts and peace-building in Lebanon, focused particularly on refugee communities from Syria and internally displaced people from within Lebanon itself. She has a particular interest in post-war geographies and narratives of displacement; in how different affected communities present their histories and identities through different artistic media; and how different forms of art can create avenues for peace activism, by helping people work through the complexities of solidarity, responsibility and ethics. 

We hope you enjoy the episode. You can find out more about the Art of Peace project on their website, and more information about In Place of War is available here. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.

For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this week's episode, Alice interviews Roberta Bacic, a Chilean collector, curator and Human Rights advocate, about the ‘Conflict Textiles‘ collection which she oversees. In 2008, Roberta was involved as guest curator at an exhibition called ‘The Art of Survival’, hosted in Derry-Londonderry. The exhibition was focused on different women’s experiences of survival, and it was inspired in part by a Peruvian arpillera (a form of tapestry) which Roberta had brought to a meeting, to illustrate how women on both sides of the long-running conflict in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s represented their experiences and used the stories they had sewn as testimony at the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From there, the idea of curating a physical and digital collection of Conflict Textiles grew – and today the collection (based at Ulster University) comprises arpilleras, quilts and wall hangings from many different parts of the world, including Chile, Northern Ireland, Croatia, Colombia, Germany, India, Zimbabwe and Syria. These works of art not only depict conflict and its consequences. In many cases, they embody the resilience of the people who created them, and they can be read as acts of resistance too: fabric forms of storytelling that advocate for justice and promote alternatives to conflict.

In the podcast we discuss the origins of the arpillera tradition in Chile during the 1970s and its gradual 'diaspora' around the world as a medium of communication and protest, despite a ban on exports once Pinochet's regime began to understand the power of these 'conflict textiles'. Roberta reflects on their tactile dimension: made up of scraps of ordinary household cloth, they connect viewers to their makers and the stories they want tell in very tangible ways. Made mostly by women, they use domestic materials and techniques to make private griefs public and to amplify marginalised voices. Whether they are documenting events as they unfold or looking back on past conflicts, they play an important role in bearing witness to atrocities and in empowering victims to demand justice, both individually and collectively. Many of the Conflict Textiles we discuss either represent groups of women coming together to demonstrate against violence or are themselves the products of collaborative work. We discuss their often beautiful, seemingly cheerful aesthetics, and the ways in which they subvert visual storytelling trends to communicate the loss and suffering inflicted by conflict. They often combine storytelling with symbolism, and that gets us talking about the 'language of textiles' which transcends borders and continues to resonate across time. Among the pieces we look at are an arpillera made in 2021 by a Syrian refugee, a quilt made by WAVE trauma centre participants in Northern Ireland in 2013, and a textile stitched by an ex-combatant in Colombia who wants to 'unstitch' the idea that he is a monster and not human. These Conflict Textiles have much to teach us not just about habits and techniques of visualising war and its aftermath but also about what the process of visualisation and re-visualisation can achieve.

We hope you enjoy the episode. A blog with some of the images we discuss is available here, and listeners can find many more images on the Conflict Textiles website. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link.

For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

In this week's episode, Alice interviews award-winning artist George Butler. George's art covers a huge range of topics, but he specialises in current affairs and his visual reportage from conflict zones like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria has won plaudits from the likes of Jeremy Bowen and Michael Morpurgo. George's work often takes him to places which other people are trying to leave. In August 2012, for example, he walked from Turkey across the border into Syria where, as a guest of the Free Syrian Army, he set about drawing the impacts of the civil war on people and towns. Over the last decade he has been to refugee camps in Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), oil fields in Azerbaijan, to Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mosul, and to Gaza with Oxfam, among many other places. His drawings have been published by the Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, CNN, Der Speigel, and a host of other media outlets; and they have also been exhibited at the Imperial War Museum North and the V&A museum, among other places. George has also recently published a book, Drawn Across Borders: True Stories of Migration, which tackles one of the many ripple effects of conflict and shines a spotlight on some of the humans behind the headlines.

In the podcast, we talk about drawing as a dynamic process: one in which the artist invests time, and during which the people being drawn might come and go, shift position or mood, fade into the background or come into focus. George’s drawings capture the rhythm of a place over several hours, enabling him to convey a context and set of experiences that are less easily observed through the fast shutter speed of a camera lens. Another aspect of drawing that George relishes is how approachable and unthreatening an artist often seems. While a cameraman’s equipment might act as a barrier, a simple pad and pencil often gets people coming closer to look and ask questions, sparking conversations. Drawing on location involves listening to many different people and the stories they want to share; and what George hears then finds its way into the drawings as they develop. 

George reflects on the combination of aesthetics and storytelling in his reportage. While he strives to make his art beautiful, he sees little point in an attractive image which is not telling an interesting story – one that uncovers less visible, ignored or forgotten aspects of a conflict. One thing that motivates his work is the desire to round out our habits of visualising contemporary wars. We discuss the push and pull of media organisations and NGOs, who sometimes want an artist to focus on particular aspects of a conflict, and also the challenges that artists and photographers often face in deciding what is appropriate to depict in any given context. George clearly sees his drawings as fulfilling a documentary role, setting down a record for the future; but he is also interested in myth-busting, especially around migration, and his book Drawn Across Borders has been described as ‘a work of art, compassion and activism.’

We hope you enjoy the episode! A blog with some of the images we discuss is available here, and more  images are available on George’s website. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. 

For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website. 

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin