Inside Conflict: War through the Lens of Soldiers and Civilians

Friday 30 October, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton

Organised by the Sussex Centre for the Visual with support from The Centre for Resistance Studies and the War and Media Network.

This one-day symposium explores potential links between diverse lens-based depictions of war produced in the ‘first person’ alongside the inter-disciplinary possibilities their study makes available. It aims to forge connections across visual cultures that are often treated in isolation from each other, and to identify the methodologies and frameworks that different disciplines can provide when addressing films and photographs created by soldiers and civilians. In doing so, we consider what these types of image can teach us about the histories of warfare, the histories of film and photography, and the relationships they share.

The symposium draws together the perspectives of artists, curators, anthropologists, art historians, photography theorists, film studies scholars, historians, sociologists and scholars of media and communications studies to examine a wide range of visual cultures. These include first-person documentary film, ‘vernacular’ photography, community photography, participatory art, citizen journalism, soldiers’ memoirs and the circulation of images on social media.

Confirmed speakers:

  • Monica Haller (artist, USA)
  • Andrew Hoskins (Prof of Sociology, Glasgow)
  • Liam Kennedy (Prof of America Studies, UCD)
  • Irina Lembacher (Assistant Prof of Film studies, Keene State College)
  • David Alan Mellor (Prof in Art History, University of Sussex)
  • Hilary Roberts (Senior Curator, Imperial War Museum)
  • Mandy Sadan (Reader in the History of South East Asia, SOAS)
  • Lisa Silvestri (Associate Prof of Communication Studies, Gonzaga University)
  • Julian Stallabrass (Prof in Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art)