Social Media Images and Conflicts

Mette Mortensen is Professor and Deputy Head of Department at the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She specializes in visual media studies and was the Principal Investigator of the collective research projects "Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images" (2017–2022) funded by the Velux Foundation. She is the author or editor of eight books, including the monograph Eyewitness Images and Journalism: Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict (Routledge 2015) and, most recently, the volume Social Media Materialities and Protest: Critical Reflections co-edited with Christina Neumayer and Thomas Poell (Routledge 2019). Ally McCrow-Young is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication, Section of Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research focuses on emerging, and primarily visual, technologies and digital culture. Ally is a core member of the research group "Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images" which explores how digital images and connective media transform the way conflicts are represented. Her doctoral work "Incongruent Images: Connective Mourning Rituals on Instagram Following the 2017 Manchester Arena Attack" (2020) examined the intersection of violent conflicts, visual social media and everyday images.

Introduction: Social Media Images and Conflicts: Power, Proximity and Performativity 1. Relational Labour or Digital Resistance: Social Media Practices of Non-Western Women Photographers 2.The Unfolding of a Proxy Profession: Evidence, Verification and Human Dignity on Social Media 3. Incendiary Images: Visual Reportage of Syria’s Civil War 4. Social Media Icons: Evidence and Emotion 5. Embodied Protests on Social Media: The Visual Political Discourses of Vulnerability and Endurance in the Cases of "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" and #IRunWithMaud 6. Image Censorship on Chinese Social Media: Image Deletion on Weibo During the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement 7. #PrayForAriana: Ritual Solidarity, Redirected Grief and Fan Commemoration on Instagram After the Manchester Arena Attack 8. Seeing Images from Conflict through Computer Vision: Technology, Epistemology and Humans