Journals
2026 EN
Clark Janine Natalya
This interdisciplinary article adopts a novel approach to thinking about the environmental impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war - and of war/armed conflict more broadly. First, it unpacks, drawing on original empirical data, how these impacts make salient the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds, which it explores with reference to the concept of solastalgia. Second, the article situates its analysis of the war's environmental impacts directly in relation to transitional justice. Calling for a relational reframing of the field that gives expression to multiply entangled lifeworlds, it reflects on what this reframing might look like and emphasises two key ideas - care and listening.
Journals
2026 EN
Sattarova Ellina
This article focuses on Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole (2019) and explores how the film re -presents the trauma of World War II and its aftermath. Central to this inquiry is the film’s focus on bodies – both on and in front of the screen. In opposition to anesthetised representations of the war in mainstream Russian media, Beanpole insists on showing suffering bodies. Central to the film’s disruption of the war myth are in particular women’s bodies: the film severs the connection between the war and the father figure and, by leaving its female protagonists without progeny, forecloses the notion of intergenerational continuity implicit in the use of the war in contemporary Russia. The film’s foregrounding of fragile bodies is inseverable from the fissures in the body of the film itself – like the fragmented bodies on-screen, the film refuses to cohere into a unity. Its hyperrealism (a claustrophobically intimate camera, long takes, and diegetic sound) brings us into uncomfortable proximity with the bodies on-screen. Its theatricality (the oversaturation of colours, painterly quality, the contrived dialogue) ruptures the film’s body yet intensifies the discomfort. Unlike mainstream Russian war narratives, the film stages a disturbing viewing experience, approximating for us the sensory experiences of its characters.
Journals
2026 EN
Kurant Elena
This article analyses the aesthetics, narrative structure, and social function of short-form protest animated films created by the collective Animators Against War (AAW) in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Collaged combinations of photographs, graphics, and sound build poignant images in which meaning emerges at the intersection of documentary and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to an episode dedicated to political prisoners, which takes the form of a documentary short, combining realistic testimonies with a subjective, emotional reconstruction of reality. The article highlights the potential of animation as a medium of emotional truth, capable of transcending the boundaries of traditional documentary by visualising experience, trauma, and memory. The presence of the analysed forms in the landscape of contemporary social media shows how microformats and short video forms draw from both the logic of digital communication and the tradition of attraction cinema and propaganda. AAW animated films are interpreted here as acts of resistance and testimonies of war that use available digital tools to shape an alternative political message, document reality, and foster social mobilisation.
Journals
2026 EN
Aretakis Catharine
This paper investigates the persecution of Roma and Sinti in Germany, France, Italy, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War to highlight the impact of pre-war attitudes on the transnational persecution of the Romani. This study posits that native involvement in the persecution was, especially significant to the persecution dynamic in each country and the evolution from persecution to genocide. This transnational study, therefore, introduces a greater understanding of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti and the dynamics in society that created it.
Journals
2026 EN
Summers Luke
This article explores how British Jews responded to the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. It questions how Jewish memories of the Holocaust influenced the way the community responded to the genocide in Bosnia. Using the British Jewish press as its source base, it identifies how British Jews extensively referenced the Shoah when responding to events in Bosnia. Highlighting a lack of international action to stop the Holocaust, British Jews attached a moral imperative to military intervention in Bosnia. It probes the idea that genocide in the Balkans had an important role in the expansion, and universalization, of Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s.
Journals
2026 EN
Bourassa Gregory N.
This paper explores the role of injunctions, their relation to education policy, capitalist relations of production, and teaching. As forms of command, injunctions are a lubricant for policy orientations, and they operate within and produce social relations that are tethered to modes of production. I focus on two injunctions—’Just Be Yourself!’ and ‘Love Your Job!’—and show how they operate as ways of making the teacher and shaping conduct from within to constitute ways of being for capital . I suggest that these injunctions operate in service of a larger class war and necessitate collective study, astute problem framing, organization, and revolutionary practice.
Journals
2026 EN
Siddiqua Ayesha · Iqbal Muhammad Zubair
The study attempts to understand how Pakistani journalists perceive Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and resilience in the wake of covering traumatic events. Qualitative interviews of 32 Pakistani journalists were conducted who had covered military operations against militants. The findings indicated that most of the journalists were not able to comprehend the impact of covering traumatizing events as they were war-excited. Conflict journalists perceived PTSD as depression, anxiety, insomnia, and intrusive recollection of events after exposure to traumatic events. Journalists who were exposed to beheadings and events involving killing of women and children felt more vulnerable and perceived PTSD as having a numbing effect on them. Dependence on family and friends was considered more crucial for dealing with the after effects of exposure to trauma than seeking therapy. Non-availability of medical insurance and funds from the media organizations were termed as important reasons for avoiding therapy. Resilience for conflict reporters was mostly perceived as the ability to “cope up” and to contribute to the wellbeing of others along with the ability to revisit trauma sites to report follow-up stories. Resilience was considered more achievable in the presence of organizational acknowledgement, compensation, and recognition of work.
Journals
2026 EN
Chabvuta Tamanda
Mainstream Western films depict a dominant perspective of Africa that marginalizes the African woman’s experiences. This paper critically examines the portrayal of African women in two war films, Hotel Rwanda and Half of a Yellow Sun . This paper argues that utilizing an African feminist lens of inquiry reshapes the perception of African women on film. Employing a textual analysis grounded in African feminism, findings challenge the constant focus on male characters by critically highlighting African women’s centrality in fostering sociocultural cohesion within communities. Through sensemaking, family and societal organization, the African woman supports collective survival, often assuming multiple roles such as caregiving and bearing emotional labor, even as male figures remain peripheral. The paper calls for further exploration and conceptualization of African feminism in communication studies by applying its tenets to media portrayals of Africa and advocates for intercultural communication research to center and elevate African indigenous epistemologies for African media literacy.
Journals
2026 EN
Łuczak Dorota · Paradowska Aleksandra
This paper examines a distinctive repository of material testimony related to the largest wave of migration in Europe after the Second World War: the photographic Archive of the Western and Northern Territories held by the Institute for Western Affairs in Poznań, Poland. Established immediately after the war, this institution focused on the former German territories that were incorporated into post-war Poland and soon settled by the Poles. The archive, we argue, played an active role in building connections between Polish settlers and their new environment and became a structuring framework for them. We critically analyze how the visuality of the archive and its images was crafted. Drawing on specific photographic examples, we focus on their visuality, including an unlimited game of substitution in the Derridan sense and an intertwining of various temporal perspectives. In doing so, we discuss these photographs not only as parts of the archive itself, possessing a specific taxonomy, but also as parts of the ecosystem in which the archive functions—in its various textual combinations and configurations. We offer this framework to acknowledge and demonstrate the enduring agency of the archive spanning from the period of migration to the present day.
Journals
2026 EN
Barromi-Perlman Edna
This study presents a visual analysis of two ID cards of mother and daughter in Rome, under Nazi occupation. The study seeks to unravel the mechanism and use of forged ID cards during Nazi occupation, focusing on the construction of the portraits, text, and signatures, and how they project on the presumed authenticity of the information in the ID card. The portraits and signatures are compared to portraits and signatures from before and after the war. The analysis of the image and the text explore the process of making meaning of the visual and textual data in the forged cards. The procurement, function and use of ID cards in Rome during the Nazi occupation provide a contextual background for this research. The analysis aims to explore whether such portraits, taken for ID cards, can serve as a site of memory, as a mnemic trace of a family’s untold trauma in a case where memory does not exist.