Postponed until after the midsummer festivities, we are now happy to send you summer greetings combined with updated information about our recent activities.
The first six months of the year were dedicated to writing a book manuscript titled Peace, Complexity, Visuality: Ambiguities in Peace and Conflict. We are happy to say that just before midsummer, we managed to submit the manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan where it will appear in the Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies series, edited by Oliver Richmond, Annika Björkdahl and Gëzim Visoka.
In Peace, Complexity, Visuality, we argue that we can capitalize on the tolerance of ambiguity enhancing potentialities inherent in visual images – their non-coherence – and thus increase our capability of tolerating ambiguities. Studying international relations equals studying ambiguity. The international system is complex, and where there is complexity, there is also ambiguity. Crucially, in a world saturated not only with ambiguities but also with visual images, it is mandatory to think ambiguity and visuality together. We analyze the constructive and peaceful potentialities of ambiguities through an exploration of journalistic imagery in the context of post-war Bosnia and post-siege Sarajevo. The book also contains original photographs taken in Sarajevo between 2018 and 2022.
We are also happy to say that in February 2023, Journal of Peace Education published our article ‘Interactive Peace Imagery – Integrating Visual Research and Peace Education.’ We introduced this article in an earlier blog post and can, therefore, be brief here. In the article, we suggest Interactive Peace Imagery (IPI) as a teaching tool utilizing digitization and active interaction in order for students to learn to appreciate and capitalize on the plurality of meanings that visual images always carry with them.
Forthcoming work includes an article co-written with Tiffany Fairey (King’s College London) to be published in The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding Communication, edited by Stefanie Pukallus and Stacey Connaughton. The piece is titled ‘Peace Photography, Visual Peacebuilding and Participatory Peace Photography.’ We are glad about the continuation of our cooperation with Tiffany, who arguably is the expert on participatory photography as peace photography. Furthermore, Frank’s chapter titled ‘Children of Rwanda: Peace Photography and the Temporality of the Aftermath’ will be included in Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding, edited by Tom Allbeson and Jolyon Mitchell.
We are also happy about our ongoing cooperation with David Shim (University of Groningen). David and Frank presented a paper titled ‘Digitizing the Agenda of Visual Peace Research’ at an authors’ workshop on ‘Social Media in International Conflicts and Peacebuilding,’ organized by Anna Reuß and Stephan Stetter at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich in April 2023.
We hope that your summer will be without conflict or, should conflict arise, that you will be able to deal with it peacefully and constructively.