Inside Conflict: War through the Lenses 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.

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This one-day symposium explores potential links between diverse lens-based depictions of war produced in the ‘first person’ along with 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 made by soldiers and civilians. In doing so, we will also 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 anthropologists, art historians, photography theorists, film studies scholars, historians, sociologists and scholars of media and communications studies, along with those of practising artists and curators, to examine a wide range of visual cultures. These include first-person documentary film, ‘vernacular’ photography, community photography, relational 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 (Ass Prof of Film studies, Keene State College)
David Alan Mellor (Prof in Art History, University of Sussex)
Hilary Roberts (Senior Curator of Photography, Imperial War Museum)
Mandy Sadan (Reader in the History of South East Asia, SOAS)
Lisa Silvestri (Ass Prof of Communication Studies, Gonzaga University)
Francesco Sebregondi and Christina Varvia (Centre for Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths)