Media Witnessing

From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologies. In this book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications of 'media witnessing'.

Recent political conflicts signal an increased proliferation of image testimonies shared widely via social media. Although witnessing with and through images is not a phenomenon of the internet era, contemporary digital image practices and politics have significantly intensified the affective economies of image testimonies. This volume traces the contours of these conditions and develops a conception of image testimony along four areas of focus. The first and second section of this volume reflects the discussion of image testimonies as an interplay of evidential qualities and their potential to express affective relationalities and emotional involvement. The third section focuses on the question of how social media technologies shape and subsequently are shaped by image testimonies. To further complicate the ethical position of the witness, the final section looks at image testimony at the intersection of creation and destruction, taking into account the perspectives of different actors and their opposed moral positions. With an emphasis on the affectivity of these images, Image Testimonies provides new and so far overlooked insights in the field. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology and Social Policy, Media and Communications, Visual Arts and Culture and Middle East Studies.

Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship. Practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars who wish to understand the lived realities and dynamics of contemporary conflicts will find this book invaluable.

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Dismantling the primacy and notion of traditional human-based forms of witnessing, Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help us better understand contemporary crises. He examines the media-specificity of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land and autonomous drone warfare to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic investigative tools. Throughout, he illuminates the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability. By challenging readers to rethink their understanding of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in the context of interconnected crises, Richardson reveals the complex entanglements between witnessing and violence and the human and the nonhuman.

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities--using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates. This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people--slavery, lynching, and police brutality--and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy--of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving. Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum objectâ€_x009d_ in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisationâ€_x009d_ of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

With discourses of ’crisis’ and ’disaster’ featuring strongly in contemporary discourses on contemporary society, this book brings together critical perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the idea of ’crisis’ as inherently related to power dynamics and the formation of different subjectivities and identities within the Nordic countries and globally. This volume emphasizes the importance of investigating the interrelationship of three crises - social, economic and environmental - as these address the interlinked surfaces of the same reality, and it examines the negative connotations of the notion of crisis, whilst also raising the question of when and why something becomes identified as crisis, and for whom. With chapters on media representations of crisis and the global context of crisis discourses, the crisis of national identities and their mobilization in response, and environmental crisis, as well as the interrelationship between the social and the environmental and the different positioning of individuals in relation to power, this volume offers an understanding of crisis as a multivocal symbol of the present. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, literature and political science.