The Contributors

Sean Aday is Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs at George Washington University. His research focuses on the intersection of media, war, foreign policy, public diplomacy and public opinion.

Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen is the Editorial Assistant for Media, War & Conflict. Her research focus inter alia on the critical and strategic visualization of state-corporate-military power and contemporary warfare, aiming to reinvigorate visual culture debates surrounding war and conflict by proposing critically recalibrated vocabularies for its representation in an increasingly neoliberal, globally corporatized world order.

Nathaniel Brunt is an interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer and educator. Brunt is currently pursuing a PhD in the Communication and Culture joint programme at Ryerson University and York University in Toronto, Canada. His doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and The Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. Brunt is a co-founder and co-director of the Kashmir Photo Collective.alpha etc

Precious N Chatterje-Doody is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University, UK. Her research centres on questions of global communication, perception and security, with a particular focus on Russia. She is the author of ‘The Russian Identity Riddle: Unwrapping Russia’s Security Policy’ (Routledge, forthcoming) and tweets @PreciousChatD.

Rhys Crilley is Postdoctoral Researcher in Global Media at The Open University, UK. His research explores the intersections of social media, images and conflict. In May 2020 he is to begin a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Glasgow exploring narratives of nuclear weapons and how emotions shape policies of deterrence and disarmament. He tweets at @RhysCrilley.

Eileen Culloty is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Future Media and Journalism at Dublin City University where she is research lead on disinformation for the H2020 project ‘Provenance’ and a member of the management team for the MSCA project ‘JOLT’ on journalism and technology. Her research has been published in Environmental Communication, Digital Journalism, European Journal of Communicationand Critical Studies on Terrorism.

Jolle Demmers is Full Professor in Conflict Studies, co-founder of the Centre for Conflict Studies and the director of the History of International Relations section of Utrecht University. She is the author of Theories of Violent Conflict (Routledge, second edition, 2017). Together with Lauren Gould she is the founder of The Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme, among their recent publications is An Assemblage Approach to Liquid Warfare (Security Dialogue, 2018).

Kevin Foster is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne. Educated in the UK, Canada and Australia he has conducted original research with the Australian, British, Dutch, German, Israeli, Canadian and US militaries. He has published widely on war, memory, cultural history, national identity and combat photography, and his work has appeared in a range of national and international journals. He is the author of Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (1999) and Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of Empire (2009). He edited What Are We Doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (2009) andThe Information Battlefield: Representing Australians at War (2011). His most recent monograph is Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict (2013).

Melanie Friend is a photographic artist. From 2003-19 she was Reader in Photography in the School of Media, Film & Music at the University of Sussex. In the 1980s Friend worked extensively as a photojournalist, before focusing on the wider aspects of war through long-term projects, touring exhibitions and books. Earlier works include No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Midnight Editions, USA, 2001), Border Country (2007, Belfast Exposed Gallery and The Winchester Gallery) and The Home Front (Dewi Lewis Publishing in association with Impressions Gallery, 2013). The Plain will be published in October 2020 (Dewi Lewis Publishing). See melaniefriend.com for details of forthcoming exhibitions.

Jill Gibbon is an artist and activist working on a project documenting the international arms trade by visiting industry events undercover.  She has exhibited the project internationally, written The Etiquette of the Arms Trade (2018), and has drawings in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum and Peace Museum.  She is a Reader in Art at Leeds Beckett University.

Lauren Gould is Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at the Centre for Conflict Studies at the History of International Relations section of Utrecht University. Together with Jolle Demmers she is the founder and the project leader of The Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme. The programme aims to inform an academic as well as public debate on the intimate realities of the remote wars waged in our name. Among their recent publications is An Assemblage Approach to Liquid Warfare (Security Dialogue, 2018). 

Kholoud Helmi is a Syrian gender and media expert and the co-founder and board member of Enab Baladi newspaper established in 2011. She won the 2015 Anna Politkovskaya Award for her work on Syria and the 2017 International Award Association’s Courage under Fire Award for the documentary ‘Cries from Syria’. In 2016, Marie Claire magazine called her ‘the bravest woman in the world’. Kholoud holds an MA in Media and Development and is a Chevening Scholar.

Dina Matar is Head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at SOAS, University of London, and reader in Arab Media and Political Communication. Her work focuses on political communication practices in non-Western contexts, communication strategies in conflict, activism, representation, identities and narrative politics in the Arab world. She is author of What It Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (2010); co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (2014); co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Lebanon and Palestine(2013) and Gaza as Metaphor (2016).

Jane Quinn is a curator and writer. Formerly a BBC television executive producer and international adviser on the development of digital content, she worked in the media industry during the transition from analogue to digital technologies. A published author, in 2019 she completed her PhD in contemporary war art, at Birkbeck, University of London.

David Snetselaar is Assistant Research Fellow at the Center for Global Challenges at Utrecht University and studies how, despite the remote documentation of acts of violence made possible by open-source online investigation, state transparency and accountability remain limited and the spaces for contestation narrow. David is also part of The Intimacies of Remote Warfare team at the Centre for Conflict Studies.

Liudmila Voronova is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests include gender and journalism, political communication, media and conflict, and, recently, photography and educational processes. In 2016–2018, she was a part of the research project ‘Propaganda and management of information in the Ukraine-Russia conflict: From nation branding to information war’, funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.