On accidental archives and shaping the military understanding of war

Chair: Dr Michael Innes, Director of the Conflict Records Unit

Speakers: 

• Dr Matthew Ford, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of West Sussex
• Professor Andrew Hoskins, Interdisciplinary Professor in Global Security, University of Glasgow

This event is part of the Conflict Records Unit speaker event series with scholars and practitioners in the field of conflict records. 

Patterns of digitisation accelerate political and military decision-making even as the broadcast media have continued to play a part in shaping narratives for those audiences who remain wedded to 20^th century forms of communication. At the same time other sections of the public use social media to engage with the atrocities of war with an imminence never previously experienced.

Dr Matthew Ford will discuss these developments in the content of what he terms the new war ecology - the disjuncture in the cultures of government, the broadcast era and contemporary participatory journalism.

This development has produced multiple accidental and more immediately accessible archives outside government bureaucracies that have shaped distinct cycles of sense-making and remembering. Audiences are regularly exposed to these archival sources in ways that contradict how government’s present their narratives. As a consequence, different audiences in the armed forces, within governments and across society have different expectations about archives and perceive war in disconnected temporalities. This disjuncture is a feature of the new war ecology, one that only serves to amplify opacity, uncertainty and undermine consensus and social cohesion.

Speaker biographies:

Dr Matthew Ford is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of West Sussex, having joined the University as a Lecturer in in August 2013. Prior to this he was a lecturer in War and Security at the University of Hull (2010-2013), a Sessional Lecturer in International Security at Birkbeck College London (2008-2009) and a Teaching Assistant at King's College London (2006-2008). Matthew has also occasionally taught as a Sessional Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham (2009-2011). Matthew has a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King's College London (KCL); an MA in War Studies from KCL and a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Reading.

Professor Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Professor in Global Security in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His books include: Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (2018, Ed.) and Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (2016, with Tulloch). He is Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory, Mind & Media, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Digital War.

Ford and Hoskins’ book Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century will be published by Hurst & Co in March.

Register via Zoom