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War photography scholarship tends to focus attention on photographers' lives and the thematic content of images. This study shifts the spotlight onto how varied members of the public respond to a body of work, in this case the photography and filmmaking of Tim Hetherington (1970-2011), whose archive the Imperial War Museum (IWM) obtained in 2017. We discuss findings from a number of visually-led focus groups with refugees, veterans, military family members, photography students and museum volunteers. Together we examined his image-making process with the groups to discover how they discussed notions such as intimacy, masculinity, the 'good' conflict photograph, and ethical dilemmas. We argue that engaging with multiple public perspectives through visual elicitation methods enhances curatorial knowledge and understanding of image-making practices in this specific context, whilst also offering insights for national museums more broadly on how dialogue with diverse communities can enrich the handling and display of new collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special issue on Tim Hetherington and conflict imagery, which is the result of an international research project led by the University of Leeds and the Imperial War Museum. The project aimed to understand Hetherington's work by engaging with his associates, contemporary photojournalists, scholars, and the public. The special issue explores themes such as humanitarian photography, military masculinity, and the changing landscape of image-making during conflict. It includes articles that analyze Hetherington's representations of Afghanistan, focusing on aesthetic themes, soldiers' experiences, historical context, and audience interactions. The article concludes by encouraging further research using the Tim Hetherington collection. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores how the experiences of soldiers' wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers' wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all 'wives') and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives' groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier's wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I White sight i continues Nicholas Mirzoeff's bold intervention on visuality and counter-visuality in his earlier book, I The right to look i (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), as both seek to develop a decolonial framework for the field of visual culture studies. Alongside other contemporary scholars rethinking whiteness, such as Houria Bouteldja and Alana Lentin, Mirzoeff draws upon a longer history of decolonial thought and philosophy, featuring key figures such as Frantz Fanon, George Lamming and Stuart Hall. Mirzoeff later queries whether Lamming had in fact adopted the expression from Fanon, who had used it in an address at the first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. [Extracted from the article]

In a Parliament called back following its unlawful prorogation in September 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson touched a raw nerve by stating that the 'best way to honour Jo Cox's memory is to get Brexit done'. Johnson had earlier dismissed concerns about threats to Members of Parliament which echoed his inflammatory language as 'humbug'. We examine this critical parliamentary moment in the context of broader discussions about emotionality, toxic discourse and polarisation in the United Kingdom. The study combines performance analysis of the Hansard transcripts and UK Parliament YouTube coverage of the debate, with discourse analysis of national and local newspaper coverage from 25 September to 1 October 2019. We contend that in-depth examination of this moment, alongside the subsequent journalistic commentary, contributes an original case study which works to illuminate the intersections of political performance, affective atmospheres and gender in contemporary mediated political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five years after the murder of British MP, Jo Cox, during the European Union referendum campaign in 2016, this article examines the More In Common initiative through two sites of participatory practice: on Twitter via two related hashtags–#MoreInCommon and #LoveLikeJo–and the 'More In Common' exhibition (2021–2022) at the People's History Museum in Manchester. We consider how both spaces help to organise public feeling and consider the ways in which these sites draw on Cox's identity politics and values to curate her political legacy. We identify three emergent logics through our thematic analysis of the tweets posted with the hashtags in the month following her death: connected, visual and resistant. Considering the political legacy of 'more in common' 5 years later, we then trace the movement of the campaign from the digital to the physical and assess the ways in which Cox's values are crystalized through co-created participatory artistic projects displayed in public gallery space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Get Together was first held in the United Kingdom in June 2017, to commemorate the death of Labour Party MP, Jo Cox, murdered by a far-right extremist a year earlier, and to celebrate diversity in local communities. I argue that the Great Get Together offers an illuminating experiment in convivial politics ; a concept discussed and developed further in the article. Drawing upon scholarship about events and media events, the article traces the mediated formations and flows of the Great Get Together as it is promoted by mainstream media and by citizens sharing affinities and experiences on social media. By examining the aesthetics and styling of convivial politics promoted by those involved in the tapestry of Great Get Together events, drawing upon Robin Wagner-Pacifici's framework of 'political semiosis', I critically assess its capacity for building solidarity across political divides, alongside the limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade represents a critical moment in the story of Serbia's democratisation process and highlights the threat that right-wing extremism poses to democratic rights and personal freedoms. Through a focus on patterns of visibility and visuality in the coverage of different protagonists in the streets of Belgrade, we explore the ways in which distinct communities perform their affinities, their right to be seen in public spaces, and rejection of 'the other'. We conduct a visual framing analysis across four news programmes (RTS, Prva TV, TV B92 and Pink TV), emphasising the stylistic-semiotic choices which work to construct the contested spaces of the city. In shifting attention to how the news images work to create the spaces of political 'appearance' and the potentials for political agency through mediated visibility, the article explores the uneasy ambivalence of the democratisation process for authorities and the resulting marginalisation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process, they have become authorities on training citizens and activists to produce videos that are institutionally meaningful, and hold legitimacy in human rights courts as well as across the fields of journalism and political advocacy. Human rights organizations adapted their practices and, as a result, professionalized video activism. [Extracted from the article]

New media technologies present greater opportunities for the unguarded and personalized aspects of war to be shared in public spaces, including an element that militaries prefer remains unseen: the depiction of "our boys" killing. This article examines how soldiers' transgressive visual practices of posing with dead bodies during the war in Afghanistan are re-presented in the mainstream UK press, and analyses the reactions garnered from group interviews with serving military media operations personnel, veterans' groups and forces families. Contradictory impulses are revealed in the news media's outraged revelling in the presumed scandal, and in the focus group participant responses, many of whom reject the premise for the news story whilst also acknowledging common experiences of combat and the desire to show others "what war's like". The article therefore contributes to debates on the news mediation of amateur snapshot images, the imbrication of photographic practices in wartime experience and the limitations of the news media as national moral arbiters. In prioritizing a methodological and analytical focus on the (military) audience rather than the news coverage, the article highlights how engagement with journalistic images and texts can act as a catalyst for identity-affirmation and for thinking critically about the military- media nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial provides a brief overview of the wide range of work on media-military relations from different disciplinary areas internationally and indicates a number of prominent themes together with those needing further attention. It locates issues of media technology, form and use within the contexts of the political and public framing of military activities. Before introducing the contributing articles, it notes how different factors of change both inside and outside the institutions of the armed forces are shifting the terms of visibility, legitimacy and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a qualitative research project which invited those with direct experience – as serving personnel involved in media operations, military veterans and forces family members – to respond to a variety of media genres and discuss how such portrayals of military experience correspond with their own perceptions and their own representational practices. It is our contention that such mediations offer significant and interconnected spaces through which to explore negotiations of the meanings of military experience in contemporary public culture. Drawing on thematic analysis from our focus groups, we address a number of research questions: In what ways do the participants identify and engage with the various media portrayals, and how do they think this relates to the perceived public profile of the armed forces? How do they assess the capability of media texts to provide insights into the ‘realities’ of military experience (including emotionally charged moments of camaraderie and trauma)? In the multiple challenges and ambiguities heard within our groups, we find complex and troubled senses of ‘militariness’, bound up with sometimes intense affectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on original empirical research and theories of cultural geography, this article investigates the multiple ways community is produced, understood and valued through a closer interrogation of the community centre as a contested site. The paper investigates the symbolism of the buildings [see Dovey, K. (1999) Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form. Routledge, London] as they are claimed and framed by local government; the use of the buildings and how this contributes to what we might call the overall assemblage or forming of the building [see Lees (Towards a critical geography of architecture: the case of ersatz colosseum. Cult. Geograp.; 2001 8:51–86), De Landa (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, Continuum, London, Jacobs (A geography of big things, Cult. Geograph. 2006;13:1–27)]; the affect of the buildings or architecture on community use [see Thrift, N. (2004) Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 57–78]; and disruptive, haptic, unintended or ‘queer’ use of such spaces (see Grosz (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). In so doing, we argue that an investigation of architecture can offer key insights and contributions to debates in wider policy, particularly in relation to the values and affordances of ‘community’ in the UK today. By focusing on the community centre, we also shift the existing focus of much architectural research away from what Jacobs has called ‘big things’ [Jacobs (A geography of big things, Cult. Geograph. 2006;13:1–27, pp. 4–5)] onto ordinary, everyday and mundane architectures of community centres. Secondly, we argue that, particularly the newer breed of ‘community facing social enterprise centres’, construct and imagine notions of communities in inherently problematic ways, and while in some instances such productions and imaginings are disrupted through use, the architecture nevertheless continues to be claimed by local government as a powerful indicator of (a particular notion and construction of) community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including works done in the field of media and communication, international relations, and political geography, genre of contemporary military memoir shape the wars, and journalistic practices.

This article examines the visual coverage of civilian casualty incidents in the first month of the Iraq invasion in 2003, drawing on a detailed and comprehensive content and framing analysis of Iraq war photographs printed in seven British national newspapers. The study found that around 7 per cent of all Iraq-related news photographs dealt with the issue of civilian casualties (including journalists and non-Iraqis), across tabloid and 'quality' press titles. However, the prominence, treatment and functions of civilian casualty photographs varied greatly among particular newspapers, and not always in a predictable manner considering the papers' editorial positions on the conflict. The article details the study's findings on the varying occurrence of casualty-related photographs, and analyses the ways in which such events were pictorially and verbally framed; whether by graphically representing the human cost of the war or, alternatively, by 'disappearing the dead' through visual and rhetorical means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the 2003 Iraq invasion was not wholly framed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the rhetoric of bringing liberation, democratization and human rights to the Iraqi people was widely advanced by the coalition and supporters as a legitimating reason for war. This article assesses the role played by press photography in legitimizing or challenging this crucial framing during the invasion across a range of UK national newspapers. Privileging visual content in research design, the study presents selected results from a comprehensive content and framing analysis of press photography during the invasion period (March–April 2003), specifically examining the prominence and treatment of photographs in the humanitarian-related visual coverage, along with the accompanying words used to define, support or detract from the events depicted. While finding that the rationale of humanitarianism generally played well for the coalition during this study period, this article explores the problematic nature of the narrative of liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the figurative appropriations of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, drawing on a selective audit from newspapers, television, radio and blogs during the 2010 general election period. The flurry of excitement produced by Clegg's sudden visibility during the election campaign offers a unique opportunity to observe the hasty moulding of a new political persona. Across the mediascape, political commentators and humorists employed an expressive range of critique and humour to reflect on Clegg's new-found appeal. We present analysis of the various mediated attempts to ascribe to Clegg certain characteristics and values through the use of labelling, metaphor and other popular culture allusions. It is especially in the unpicking of the prevalent sexualised metaphor that our research prompts wider queries about the current mediation of British political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 Iraq War was highly controversial in the UK, generating domestic opposition and a widely supported anti-war movement, the Stop the War Coalition. This article assesses the extent to which anti-war protesters were successful at securing positive coverage in the British press immediately before and during the invasion of Iraq. The study shows that, although anti-war protesters received more favourable than unfavourable coverage prior to the war, once the war got under way, a 'support our boys' consensus led to the narrowing of what Daniel Hallin has termed the 'sphere of legitimate controversy' with the anti-war movement relegated to a 'sphere of deviance'. The article also demonstrates that elite-led protest was more successful at influencing newspaper debate than grassroots protest. Overall, the results highlight the problems protest movements have in securing positive media representation during war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contribution of comedy to the mediation of politics in a number of genres outside the core forms of journalism. Using material collected during an extensive study of diverse media treatments of British politics, it raises questions about the functions that comedy performs within civic culture and civic subjectivity, giving emphasis to broadcasting. Selected accounts from respondent groups are used to investigate further the ways in which comedy contributes to the placing of politics within the everyday and to the naturalization, or questioning, of the power relations at work. The article concludes by suggesting that further work on comic treatments, alongside studies of other sources of political information and commentary, will be a valuable aspect of research on political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debate over media coverage of foreign affairs has been dominated by a range of theoretical positions, here characterized as the ‘elite-driven,’ ‘independent’ and ‘oppositional’ models. In this article, we explore the relative cogency of these theoretical positions in the context of British media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. We find that coverage generally conformed to the elite-driven model, reinforcing the coalition. Nevertheless, our analysis also provides evidence to support the independent and oppositional models. Regarding casualties and the humanitarian situation, we find significant levels of coverage which support the oppositional model and the notion of event-driven news. Overall, our study points toward a more nuanced understanding of media-state relations than is suggested by the existing elite-driven paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]