Untitled

محاضرة اليوم الثاني
Day 2 Lecture
زاهرة حرب
Zahera Harb
عزة الحسن
Azza El Hassan
الجلسة الثالثة
Session 3
سلسبيل عبد الباقي
Salsabil Abdalbaki
عثمان عثمان
Osman Osman
وليد السقاف
Walid Al-Saqaf
تيزيانو بونيني
Tiziano Bonini
الجلسة الرابعة
Session 4
أوهام رشيد محمد
Awham Mohammed
إيليز دانيوه عودة (مشاركة عن بعد)
Elise Daniaud Oudeh (Online Participant)
محمد حماس المصري
Mohamad Hamas ElMasry
طاولة مستديرة تغطية الحرب: التحديات الحالية وآفاق المستقبل - اليوم الثالث
Roundtable on Reporting War: Current Challenges and Prospects
المتحدثون في الطاولة المستديرة
The Panel
الجلسة الخامسة
Session 5
ساديا زامير
Sadia Zamir
سيد عرفان أشرف
Syed Irfan Ashraf
ديس فريدمان
Des Freedman
حارث حسن
Harith Hasan
الجلسة السادسة
Session 6
حيدر الكلابي
Hayder Alkilabi
مهران كامرافا
Mehran Kamrava
مهند سلوم
Muhanad Seloom
محاضرة اليوم الرابع
Day 4 Lecture
تيزيانو بونيني
Taziano Bonini
فادي زراقط
Fadi Zaraqet
الجلسة السابعة
Session 7
راشيل هورفاث
Rachel Horvath
زاهرة حرب
Zahera Harb
عمار شمايلة
Ammar Shamaileh
الجلسة الثامنة
لويس رودريغو بيشي فيلاغوميز
Luis Rodrigo Pesce Villagómez
صبري إيج
Sabri Ege
تيزيانو بونيني
Tiziano Bonini
عبد الكريم أمنكاي
Abdelkarim Amengay

The second day of the ACRPS International Winter School, “Media in Wartime”, ushered in a gathering of international students and academics from around the world who set the stage for the remainder of a week in which participants engaged in rounds of paper presentations and discussions.

Day two of the Winter School started off with a lecture by Zahera Harb, Director of Postgraduate Studies and International Journalism Studies Cluster Lead at City, University of London. In her lecture, titled “Covering Gaza: Rethinking Objectivity in Times of Human Tragedies”, Harb argued that when journalists witness their people falling victim to the violence of a military, anxieties become ‘paramount’ in the areas of objectivity, impartiality, balance, and neutrality in journalism. She further argued that in the case of the war on Gaza, as well as the conflicts in southern Lebanon and Ukraine, objectivity is unachievable and must be subject to challenge.

The first session of the second day was led by the presentations of Salsabil Abdalbaki and Osman Osman. In “How Should an International Conflict be Framed? Divergence and Alignments between Local and International Media Coverage of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam”, Abdalbaki explored why and to what measures a frame alignment and/or diversity exist between the national and international media coverage on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). For his part, Osman argued in his paper titled, “It Feels Like We Are Expendable”: Marginalization and Resilience in Kenyan Embedded Journalism”, Kenyan-embedded journalists are part of a marginalized and vulnerable area in global journalism and lack the ‘symbolic capital’ and institutional support available for their Western counterparts. This type of marginalization, he argued, is rooted in the ever-enduring colonial legacies. Following both presentations, Elise Daniaud Oudeh presented on “Tourists at War: The Representations of Heritage and Culture as Instrumentalized by Russian War Reporters in Syria, 2015–2020”, while Awham Mohammed presented on “The Representation of Ukraine-Russia Conflict on Al Jazeera and Russia Today: A Critical Discourse Analysis”. Oudeh investigated how visuals dedicated to heritage and culture in social media narratives focused on the Syrian war. She did that by using a semi-automated analysis of 8174 pictures posted in 5448 social media posts written by nine Russian war reporters when covering the operations of the Russian and Syrian armies. Mohammed, meanwhile, looked into the representation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict in international broadcast media and explained how the analysis aimed at unearthing the underlying ideologies, beliefs, and biases that shape public perception.

The third day of the Winter School kicked off with a roundtable featuring Des Freedman, Zahera Harb, Tiziano Bonini, Mohammed Al-Nawaway, Basyouni Ibrahim Hamada, and Claudia Kozman. The title of the discussion was “Reporting War: Current Challenges and Prospect,” which triggered a debate around the evolving nature of war journalism, with a focus on the obstacles reporters come across and the future of this field. Session five started with two presentations by Sadia Zamir and Syed Irfan Ashraf. Zamir explained that in her paper, titled “Discursive Construction of Adversaries: Media Frames and Conflict Narratives in Television News in India and Pakistan”, she analysed how television news media ‘constructs’ democracy in Pakistan and focused on the process of ‘othering,’ particularly the framing of India as Pakistan’s principal adversary. Irfan’s “Are Journalists Their Own Worst Enemies? War on News Labour in Pakistan's Pashtun Periphery with Afghanistan”, explored how local news reporters in the tribal districts along Pakistan’s Afghan border describe their situations in the aftermath of the US regional pullout. He argued that the violence against those journalists was not a consequence of the turmoil, but rather as part of the state’s geopolitical strategy to influence Afghanistan. The sixth session of the Winter School swiftly followed with Hayder Alkilabi’s presentations on “Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait and the Mediated Politics of Nation-Building: An Applied Thematic Analysis of al-Nida' Newspaper”, showcased his archival research into 104 issues of the al-Nida' newspaper helped understand the mediated policies employed by Iraq during the invasion. He concluded his presentation by discussing the role of media in nation-building efforts.

Day four of the IWS began with a lecture by Tiziano Bonini, an Associate Professor at the University of Siena in Italy. The lecture, titled “Algorithms of Resistance in Time of War”, challenged how political activists and influencers come up with tactics of ‘algorithmic resistance’ by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that govern people’s lives and behaviours. He further delved into the three domains of everyday life – namely gig work, cultural industries, and politics – through which people reconfigure algorithms to pursue their objectives. He went on to deliberate on the moral imperative for people to resist algorithms.

Following the opening lecture, international students Rachel Horvath and Asma Jaghman presented their research projects. Horvath through her paper, titled “Eye on Palestine: A Case Study of News and Emotion on Instagram”, questioned the very nature of emotions and how they affect people’s decisions to share political media on Instagram. Through a case analysis of 661 Instagram Reels and multiple quasi-poisson regressions from the news and activism account “Eye on Palestine”, Horvath found that ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ ‘anger,’ and ‘sadness’ have a direct link to media shares in context-specific ways. Jaghman’s paper, titled “Censorship during War: Media Censorship in Modern Warfare across Regime Types”, examined how mitigating press freedom has served as a proxy for state censorship. She argued that while both democratic and autocratic regime types reduce press freedom, the magnitude and visibility of censorship vary. Following the break, session eight of the IWS started with a presentation by Luis Rodrigo Pesce Villagómez who presented on “Patterns of Peril: Analysing Violence Against Journalists in Mexico by Type of Aggression, Aggressor, and Coverage”. He explained how he found a series of trends in anti-press aggression with a specific focus on its evolution in Mexico, the geographical distribution of aggressions, among other areas. The day concluded with Sabri Ege’s presentation, “Framing the State of Exception: Chinese Media Representations of the Uyghur Internment Camps”. Ege analysed the discursive representation of the Uyghur camps in English language Chinese Media by drawing upon the concept of the state of exception and critical studies of the war on terrorism. On top of other reasons, he claimed, the normalization of the state of exception in Xinjiang internment camps, during the war on terror, falls along the lines of deeper ethnic, racial, colonial, and Islamophobic tensions.

The Internation Winter School will continue until 16 January 2025. The last two days of the agenda will include four presentations and two lectures, in addition to a workshop, titled “Use Cases of AI in Journalism”.