Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
In October, Palgrave Macmillan will publish our book Peace, Complexity, Visuality: Ambiguities in Peace and Conflict. In preparation for the book’s release, we will publish blog posts over the next couple of weeks introducing the book’s different parts.
In October, Palgrave Macmillan will publish our book Peace, Complexity, Visuality: Ambiguities in Peace and Conflict. In preparation for the book’s release, we will publish a couple of blog posts over the next weeks introducing the book’s main lines of thought and its different parts.
Postponed until after the midsummer festivities, we are now happy to send you summer greetings combined with updated information about our recent activities.
In 1648, the peace of Münster and Osnabrück, ending the Thirty Years’ War that had raged across vast swathes of Europe, established sovereignty and territorial integrity as the basic organizing principles for the modern state. As Kalevi Holsti reminds us, the Treaties of Westphalia were unique: “Europe had not previously witnessed a multilateral diplomatic gathering that was designed both to terminate a pan-European war and to build some sort of order out of the chaos into which Europe had increasingly fallen since the late fifteenth century” (1991: 25).
Venturing into peace education, we have written an article titled Interactive Peace Imagery – Integrating Visual Research and Peace Education. The article is now available in Journal of Peace Education.
We are happy to announce publication in Membrana – Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture of a new article on the photography of Richard Mosse, written together with Rune Saugmann. The piece, designed for the journal’s Skin issue, is now available online.
This year has seen shocking and devastating developments on a global scale. The Russian war against Ukraine certainly affected our attempts of comprehending international affairs, and advancing peace more broadly appears rather illusionary in these times. When one year comes to an end – especially such a calamitous one – the hopes for the next year to bring better news are high.
We are happy to announce publication of an article titled “Active Looking: Images in Peace Mediation” in the peer-reviewed journal Peacebuilding.
On September 15 and 16, imageandpeace participated in the 13th edition of the conference on Popular Culture and World Politics – New (A)venues – in Magdeburg, Germany.
What happens after Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment? Photographic images, this exhibition argues, “fundamentally shape acts of seeing and being seen.” Serving as “contextual frames for narrative invention,” photographs define to some extent what qualifies as knowledge. Photography produces knowledge but also confirms established ways of knowledge production by operating within established frames and conventions. In contrast, Currency – Photography Beyond Capture “looks at how … practitioners have challenged the meaning and value of photographic images and investigated the extended lives, temporalities, and materialities of image cultures beyond the moment of capture.”