Visualising War Research Group

Description

Alice König and Nicolas Wiater established the Visualising War Research Group in 2017 to promote more cross-disciplinary dialogue and knowledge-exchange around the study of war-storytelling. Originally focused on antiquity, the project has since been expanded by Alice König to explore discourses of war and peace from antiquity to the present day.

Our members work in a wide range of fields, including Art History, Classics, English, Evolutionary Biology, Film Studies, History, International Relations, Management, Modern Languages, Philosophy and Psychology. We have also built strong partnerships with experts working in other sectors beyond academia, including military personnel, peacebuilding practitioners, and a wide range of professionals working within different storytelling industries: museum curators, visual artists, journalists, photographers, theatre-makers, documentary makers, online game designers and musicians.

Our particular focus of interest is discourses of war: e.g., narratives that anticipate, dread, encourage, celebrate, or critique war; representations of battle itself; articulations of military expertise or failure, on and off the battlefield; post-conflict story-telling, by perpetrators, victims, journalists, lawyers; and the use of military metaphors to tell other combative tales. We deal with many different narrative media (e.g., historical texts, oral anecdotes, artistic representations, political speeches, film and stage drama, commemorative events, social media) and we approach this material from many different angles. Our mix of Humanities and Social Science expertise enables us to conduct rigorous cross-disciplinary exploration of what war stories do and how they shape individuals’ and groups’ experiences, identities and behaviours.

In bringing such a range of scholars together to think collaboratively about discourses of war in different genres, media, periods and places, we aim not only to enrich our respective research projects but also to inform public understanding of past and present habits of visualising war, and to make clearer the role that battle narratives and war stories generally can play in shaping and even mitigating or preventing future conflict. To this end, we work closely with non-academic experts, such as military personnel, veterans, defence trainers and strategists, war reporters, artists, story-tellers, film- and theatre-professionals and museum curators.

Principle goals:

• To support individual scholarship via regular interdisciplinary events involving external invited speakers as well as St Andrews-based researchers
• to facilitate collaborative work and provide a space where new research partnerships might form across different disciplines
• to share ideas and expertise around interdisciplinary funding opportunities and interdisciplinary publication
• to provide a forum for PG students in different disciplines to explore new research horizons, and for academic staff to collaborate on PG funding applications and PGR/PGT teaching
• to open up new opportunities for multi-School teaching initiatives and student engagement (e.g. URAs) at the undergraduate level
• to engage with other networks/groups within and beyond academia which are concerned with the conduct, representation and study of war
• to support each other in the building and maintenance of knowledge exchange partnerships with individuals and organisations outside academia
• to engage in public debate and inform and influence public discourse about the ways in which different people and societies regard, represent and respond to war

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2017

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University of St Andrews