School of Social and Political Science

Description

This is an all day event, please register your attendance via Eventbrite.

Agenda

9.00 - 9.45 am - Arrival and Welcome Coffee

9.45 am - High Definition War. Who knows or cares about the war image?

With Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh

10.30 am - Never-before seen images and film excerpts from Ukraine

In a rare appearance outside of Ukraine, and showing never seen before images and film excerpts, Kyiv-based British artist Mark Neville will talk about his current work that symbiotically fuses humanitarian aid deliveries with his documentary art practice.

12.30 pm - Lunch Break

1.30 pm - From platforms to prompts: witnessing vulnerable humanity as a cause for action

With Professor Lilie Choularaki, London School of Economics (via Zoom)

2.30 pm - From Hacked Profiles to Hacked Bodies: Participatory war and its coercive dimensions

With Dr. Lesia Kulchynska, University of Amsterdam

3.30 - 4.00 pm - Mid-afternoon Coffee Break

4.00 pm - When Images become Data: AI and the future of warfare

With Professor Anthony Downey, Birmingham City University

5.00 pm - Close

Abstracts and Bios (in order of appearance):

Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh - High Definition War. Who knows or cares about the war image?

We seem to be living through the most documented wars in history.

Never has there been so much information and disinformation available about war in real-time, recorded via smartphone and satellites, shared via chat and messaging apps, filling digital feeds. Soldiers, civilians, journalists, victims, aid workers, presidents, journalists, are all recording and uploading their experience and vision of events second by second, tracking every twist and turn. The battlefield seems open to all.

But it is wrong to call the Russian war against Ukraine in any way transparent. ‘Open source’ has always been a misnomer. Rather, this is more like crowd-sourced war, that is a war in which the claims, opinions and outrage of anyone who can post, link, like or share on social media, splinter multiple realities of experience.

Has the saturation of digital flow of human suffering broken the once presumed relationship between event, experience, representation, knowledge, response and action? Has digital participation and instant connectivity illuminated or obscured war’s human experience and costs? And is all that is left only more traumatic memory or something salvageable for remembrance, justice and accountability?

This talk offers an introduction to these, the key themes of my Warshare project.

Biography

Andrew Hoskins holds a personal chair in AI, Memory & War at the University of Edinburgh.

He leads a new ERC awarded/UKRI funded €2.27M project WARSHARE: The new war front: digital participation in war (2025-30) focusing on the Russian war against Ukraine. He is founding Co Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media and founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory Studies.

He is the author/editor of 11 books, including: Sharded Media: Trump’s Rage Against the Mainstream (with William Merrin, Palgrave 2025), The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media (edited with Qi Wang, OUP 2025), and Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century (with Matthew Ford, OUP 2022). His forthcoming books include: Memorybot: AI and the End of Human Memory (Polity 2026) and The AI Memory Machine with Kristína Čimová and Danny Pilkington (OUP 2026).

Mark Neville, Kyiv - Never-before seen images and film excerpts from Ukraine

In a rare appearance outside of Ukraine, and showing never seen before images and film excerpts, Kyiv-based British artist Mark Neville will talk about his current work that symbiotically fuses humanitarian aid deliveries with his documentary art practice. In a presentation that takes in his last two Ukraine-based photobook projects, the pre-war 'Stop Tanks with Books' and the latest publication 'Diary of a Volunteer' - made as part of his hybrid art and aid project 'Postcode Ukraine' -  Mark will outline plans for a new book project, a collaboration with Professor Andrew Hoskins.

Neville says:

When the full-blown invasion happened in 2022, as more and more friends, colleagues, and family members of my wife were dying, I did not think it was enough just to take photographs of the genocide for Western audiences. Instead, I co-founded Postcode Ukraine, a charity whose goal was to symbiotically combine my documentary art practice with humanitarian aid deliveries for my adopted home. Diary of a Volunteer is my personal record of the work of Postcode Ukraine, as I have been making humanitarian aid trips to the frontline towns for over three years. It brings together around 100 photographs I took between 2022 and 2024 of people across Ukrainian society fighting for freedom. As everyone is suffering from exhaustion, grief, depression, or traumatic stress, the book also contains not only an account of the work of other grassroots charities that Postcode Ukraine supports with grants but also an inventory of mental health services throughout Ukraine. At some point, the book evolved from requesting the West to provide quality mental health service support to an equally urgent plea to support Ukrainians in determining their future. One thousand self- published copies of the book were sent out for free to targeted audiences, including media, celebrities, historians, the super-rich, politicians, and mental health organisations in Ukraine, Europe, and the USA. Each recipient also receives my written request to join a specialised circle of supporters for Ukraine. We do not request funding or money; instead, we mean to employ people's vision and talents in the future. As a result of Postcode Ukraine, I hope my relationship as an author with my subjects and audiences is transformative. People and their wartime experiences are not just represented for news outlets, nor are issues tokenly addressed for a photo and art market. Ukrainians are instead co-creators, and they benefit in tangible, life-changing ways quickly and effectively from our charitable aid visits. The people I encounter and photograph in frontline towns - and the Ukrainian charities we work alongside and support through grants - often benefit from that meeting and our discussions and receive practical support. I benefit, too, and beyond what I could have imagined. I get the better deal. Their courage inspires me to continue, and I try to reciprocate the best way I can. It's an experiment into the potential of photography when all elements of that art world support and contribute.

"Mark Neville has re-imagined what documentary photography could be, should be. Instead of the bland ‘deconstructions’ that pass so lazily as ‘critical’ in contemporary art, he makes extraordinary pictures and finds extraordinary ways to get them back to those he has photographed." - David Campany, Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York. 

Biography

I am a British artist who moved to Kyiv two years before the full-blown invasion of 2022. I work at the intersection of art, documentary, and activism, searching out truly ethical roles for photography. My photographic projects have frequently made the places and demographics I portray the primary audience and beneficiary of the work in real terms. In my first project, The Port Glasgow Book Project, 2004, I made a coffee table book of my social documentary images of the working-class town, delivered exclusively to each of the eight thousand houses in the Port by the local boys' football team. The book was never made commercially available. My concept was to undermine the framework of exploitation inherent in how these types of images are usually disseminated as coffee-table books to middle-class audiences. The book Parade, a multi-layered portrait of the farming community in Brittany, France, was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020. 

My last book project documenting Ukraine's fight for independence, Stop Tanks With Books, which was sent out for free to 750 powerful recipients internationally before the full-blown invasion, urging their support, was shortlisted for both the Arles Photobook Award and the Aperture Photobook Award 2022. My current project takes the form of a registered charity called Postcode Ukraine, which I have run since 2022. We combine our frontline humanitarian aid deliveries with my documentary art practice. 

https://www.instagram.com/marknevillestudio/

https://www.markneville.com/

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/49-stop-tanks-with-books/id1617276298?i=1000612416807

Professor Lilie Choularaki, LSE - From platforms to prompts. Rethinking humanitarian communication in the age of platforms and AI

Illiberal political forces imposing cultures of violence, cruelty and expulsion are gaining force both the Global South and increasingly in the liberal global North. In this context, it becomes urgent to examine how humanitarian communication - the communication of vulnerable humanity as a cause for action - might still cultivate a civic imagination in which we can begin to feel and understand what it means to be human beyond our European, predominantly white, humanity. To this end, I offer critical reflections on posthumanitarianism, a dominant style of humanitarian communication defined by its abandonment of attempts to represent vulnerable humanity as a historical condition rooted in the structural violence and enduring inequalities that marked the postcolonial Global South.

While earlier, yet still pervasive, forms of humanitarianism rely on platform-driven digital aesthetics that centre western donors as benevolent consumers prompted to click like, upload and shop, emerging AI-generated representations of human suffering intensify this platform logic and its playful digital aesthetics but now also introduce an unsettling layer of colonial photorealism. Confining engagement to mobile screens, lifestyle-oriented actions and familiar tropes of the past, posthumanitarianism prioritises self-gratification over critical understanding, thereby reproducing hierarchies between those living in stability and those denied safety, dignity and recognition. Against this dynamic, we must continue our efforts to imagine and represent vulnerable humanity in ways that resist both the self-centred playfulness and the revived colonial tropes of posthumanitarianism and that reopen possibilities for meaningful care and just action beyond the confines of our immediate lifeworlds.

Biography

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research explores the ethical and political complexities of communicating human suffering, focusing on disaster news, humanitarian and human rights advocacy, war and conflict reporting and migration news. Her books include, among others, The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006), The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Posthumanitarianism (2013, ICA Outstanding Book Award 2015); The Digital Border. Mobility, Technology, Power (2022) and Wronged. The Weaponization of Victimhood (2024, ICA Outstanding Book Award 2025, and ICA Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division Best Book Award 2025). 

Dr. Lesia Kulchynska, University of Amsterdam - From Hacked Profiles to Hacked Bodies: Participatory War and its Coercive Dimensions

Hacking social media to simulate social dynamics was a trademark of the Kremlin propaganda since a notorious troll farm, Internet Research Agency (IRA), was established in 2013. IRA’s initial task was to fight Putin’s opposition, substituting the expression of social discontent in the Russian online spaces with the staged demonstration of popular love for the dictator. This expertise in faking reality became a crucial weapon during the war with Ukraine. With the recent campaigns, such as Doppelganger, Matryoshka, or Operation Overload, based on the strategy of hacking and mimicking the pages, profiles, and images of real individuals and institutional actors to express pro-Kremlin narratives, the Russian simulation machine entered international digital space, prompting numerous researchers to portray Russia as the global epicenter of disinformation innovation in the age of participatory media. 

Yet, what is often overlooked by the existing accounts on Russian propaganda is that it is not limited to faking the media representations, but is engaged in editing the physical reality itself. In my talk, I will look at how the Russian propaganda logic of faking and hacking the profiles developed into the practice of hacking the bodies, proposing to think of the Russian war against Ukraine as a violent simulation machine targeted at forceful adjustment of matter to the hollow signifier of propaganda. 

Biography

Lesia Kulchynska is a curator and researcher in media and visual studies, currently based in Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Film Studies and has worked as a researcher at the Pinchuk Art Center and as a curator at the Visual Culture Research Center and Kyiv Biennial in Kyiv. She taught courses on Media and Communication Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, and John Cabot University (Rome).  In 2018/2019, she was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University (NYC, US), where she worked on violent responses to art, studying cases of banned and attacked exhibitions in Ukraine. She was also a postdoctoral fellow of Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute of Art History (Rome, Italy) from 2022 to 2024, and a fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2024-2025), where she investigated the networked visuality of violence during the Russo–Ukrainian War. Currently, she continues her research as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on the convergence of Russian media infrastructures and infrastructures of violence on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine

Professor Anthony Downey, Birmingham City University - When Images become Data: AI and the Future of Warfare

Although regularly presented as an objective “view from nowhere”, Artificial Intelligence (AI) maintains a regime of western power that perpetuates neo-colonial violence. Adding to the apparent “black box” logic of AI, the processes involved in autonomous image production remain central, if not fundamental, to this process. This is evident in the extraction of data from digital images and the recursive technological evolution of AI-powered models of machine vision. To critically address these issues, this presentation will observe the extent to which colonial technologies of vision and image-making—including triangulation mapping, aerial photography, photogrammetry and, more recently, “operational images”—preceded the delegation of the ocular-centric, corporeal and proprioceptive event of seeing (and thinking) to the realm of automated decision making. The devolution of deliberative forms of seeing and thinking (decision-making) to unaccountable algorithmic apparatuses reveals two associated facts about the future of warfare: the degree to which subjects are increasingly rendered in terms of their disposability and, secondly, the capacity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Lethal Autonomous Weapons systems (LAWs) to propagate widespread destruction and annihilation without provoking much by way of political censure or legal accountability. 

Biography

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture (Birmingham City University). Recent and forthcoming publications include Nida Sinnokrot: Palestine is not a Garden (Sternberg Press and MIT, 2026); Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (Sternberg Press, 2024); Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems (PostScriptUM no. 47, 2023); and Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2021). In 2027, he will publish Decolonizing Vision: Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Anxieties & the Future of Warfare (MIT Press, 2027). He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text (Routledge), Digital War (Palgrave Macmillan), Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press), and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press).