14h00 – 16h00 (Central European Time)

[Zoom link to be announced]

14h00 – 15h15

Presentations on current work followed by Q&A

Zhe Xu (University of Cologne) / Ekwutosi Nwakpu (Edge Hill University) Donatella Della Ratta (John Cabot University)

14h00 – 15h15

Open plenary – state of the field and thoughts on the future of the Temporary Working Group

SESSION ABSTRACTS

The networked image in contemporary conflicts from Syria to Ukraine

Donatella Della Ratta, Associate Professor, John Cabot University

My talk ponders on what I call 'the networked image' ('Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria', Pluto Press 2018), and how it has evolved from the Arab Spring up to contemporary conflicts, particularly Ukraine. Building on Harun Farocki's work on 'operational images', I reflect on how contemporary images have abandoned their evidentiary function and no longer aim at 'representing' the empirical world, but are rather invested in creating their own, in bringing something into being. The networked image thrives on the entanglement between human, non-human, and trans-human subjects, on the complex relationship between users, bots, algorithms, and AIs that makes the contemporary web. It acquires value in being shared and circulated rather than in being looked at. Because our relation to networked images happens at the very infrastructural level of the social web – whether we like it or not, they pop up on our Twitter feeds, show up in Google searches, end up being 'recommended' by algorithms – we no longer need to look at them. We are enmeshed in their circulatory mechanism and contribute to their virality (and vitality), in spite of their content. How has the networked image evolved since the first real-time and youtubized conflict – Syria 2011- up to Ukraine 2022?

Dominant visual frames in mainstream media coverage of the global humanitarian crisis

Zhe Xu, PhD Candidate, University of Cologne

Media images have facilitated a political encounter between Western societies and arriving refugees and asylum seekers, chronicling global displacement emergencies within regimes of visibility in mediated public spheres. However, a plethora of empirical works has so far limited itself to surveying the vulnerability of the Global South as visualized by Western media clusters. This article takes a step towards ameliorating this gap in knowledge by assessing how the news media in liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes visually frame the forcibly displaced people during the Afghanistan and Ukraine crises. Analysing visual data that covers twelve leading professional media outlets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China (N = 2,572), the study adopted a

multi-stage inductive-then-deductive approach to identify a typology of visual frames and investigate the variations in the media visualities of the different crisis issues among different media systems. The findings suggest that the visualization of humanitarian crises was significantly influenced by racial and geographic hierarchies and geopolitical dynamics. The British and American media upheld the underlying neoliberalism and post-humanitarianism stance that has long underpinned Western humanitarian communication, while Chinese authoritarian media coverage manifested the politicization of humanitarian emergencies.

Televised suffering: A comparative study of British and Nigerian TV Audience Response to images of Proximal and Distant Suffering

Ekwutosi Sanita Nwakpu, PhD Candidate, Edge Hill University

Literature has demonstrated that audience research in the context of distant and proximal suffering has been under-explored, especially from an Afrocentric perspective. While a body of research from western countries has examined distant suffering, this ongoing study represents one of the earliest attempts to bridge this gap by examining this area of scholarship from a comparative approach of both African and Western perspectives. Using three disasters case study, one each from Britain and Nigeria to represent the proximal suffering and another one from Haiti to capture distant suffering, this study compares audience reactions to the televised images of the 2017 Grenfell Fire Disaster in the UK, 2014 Chibok Schoolgirls abduction in Nigeria, and Haiti 2021 earthquake. It utilises a mixed methods approach (Focus Group Discussions and Questionnaire). 72 participants (35 each from Nigeria and the UK) for the study are to be drawn from three major cities in the UK and Nigeria respectively through snowballing. Focus Group data will be analysed thematically, while questionnaire data will be analysed using SPSS.