CCIG 'War & Visuality:conflict and the politics of perception' Workshop

This workshop addresses the relationship between war and visuality to scrutinise both how questions of seeing having figured as integral to the ways in which wars are fought, and how war is encountered as a spectacle and responded to.

Through its concern with visuality the workshop will focus attention upon the relationship between war and seeing as a process of perception, including the individual’s experience of seeing from a first person perspective. In so doing the workshop will progress debates about the relationship between war and visuality on from a concern with ‘representations of war’ to address seeing as an active, integral element of how wars are waged and how they are regarded ‘externally’/ beyond the battlefield. As such, a leitmotif of the workshop will be the way in which developments in visual technologies have altered warfare. Via these concerns the workshop will address broader questions around the politics of perception, the justification and legitimacy of wars, the ties between visuality and diplomacy, and the connections between visuality, conflict and security.

The relationship between war and visuality is of acute contemporary relevance, with questions of visuality having figured as integral to the ongoing ‘War on Terror’. While addressing contemporary concerns the workshop will seek to locate these in a broader historical frame, bringing together participants from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary standpoints whose work addresses both contemporary and past conflicts.  

Workshop Themes

• War, Visuality and Technology: how developments in visual technology have altered the ways in which wars are fought and documented and how visual material is disseminated.    
• The Seen and the Unseen: changes in the aspects of conflicts that are seen and unseen, and the way in which these changes have altered the conception of war.
• War, Visuality and Ethics: the ongoing debate about the ethics of depicting war, its aftermath and the death and destruction it brings.  
• War, Visuality and Evidence: debates around the role of the visual as evidence in war and the limits of seeing as a source of knowledge.   
• War and Aesthetics: the problem of depicting war, the experience of war.  
• Visuality as Weapon: the deployment of the visual as a weapon, from ‘Shock & Awe’ to camouflage and deception.  

It is envisaged that the workshop will generate a journal special issue or edited book.