Visualising War and Peace

In this episode, Visualising Peace students Otilia and Harris interview Johanna McMullan and Paul Gallagher who are trained educators at the Widows Against Violence Empowerment (WAVE) Centre. WAVE is the largest cross-community victim group for people who have been affected by conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968-1998. While The Troubles officially ended over 25 years ago, past violence, current...

In this episode, Otilia interviews Jonathan Fisher, a founding member of the Sadvidya Foundation , which works to preserve ancient Eastern teachings of yogic philosophy. These teachings aim to promote peace and inner happiness for all humanity. Guided by dedicated practitioners, the foundation offers programs, publications and retreats to bring this ancient belief system to the modern world. In di...

In this episode, Visualising Peace student Otilia Meden interviews Dr Roxani Krystalli , a lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Roxani's work covers a broad range of topics, from storytelling in politics to the presence of care, beauty and joy in times of war. She applies feminist approaches to peace and conflict studies, and brings over a decade of experience...

In this episode, Alice introduces the Visualising Peace project's virtual Museum of Peace . (To listen to the tour with a set of images showcasing some of the museum's contents, please follow this link .) Alice begins by outlining the wider research questions which members of the Visualising Peace team have been exploring: What recurring stories do individuals and communities tell about...

In this episode, Alice interviews Dr Vindhya Buthpitiya , a St Andrews-based anthropologist who works at the intersection between conflict and visual culture. Her research focuses particularly on the production and circulation of images within the context of the Sri Lankan civil war, and she has published a wide range of articles looking at both photography and cinema, and the roles that they can...

This episode continues our exploration of forced migration by discussing ancient concepts of mobility, migration and place with Prof. Elena Isayev . An ancient historian by training, Elena's early research focused on social organisation and mobility in southern Italy from the 4th to the 1st centuries BC. She has since drawn on that deep history to apply a ‘long durée perspective’ to contempor...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict. Alice interviews Prof. Alison Phipps , a Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow and UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Language and the Arts. Alongside her academic work, Alison is Co-Convener of the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Netwo...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict. Alice interviews Hanna Dushkova , a Ukrainian lawyer and trained mediator who left Ukraine and travelled to Scotland as a refugee in July 2022. Hanna qualified as a lawyer in 2013, and got her advocate’s licence in 2018. While working to resolve disputes between conflicting parties through...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict. Alice interviews Dina Nayeri, an author and lecturer in creative writing at the University of St Andrews. Dina spent her early years in Isfahan in Iran, before fleeing with her mother and brother, after her mother was arrested for converting to Christianity. They ended up settling in the US...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict. Alice interviews Dr Waheed Arian , author of In the Wars – an autobiography, published in 2021, which narrates his journey of forced migration from Afghanistan to the UK. Dr Arian was born in Kabul in 1983 and his childhood was dominated by the Soviet-Afghan war. His family spent years flee...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict.  Alice interviews Dijana Muminovic , a Bosnian-American documentary photographer who focuses particularly on documenting war's aftermath. Dijana has personal experience of forced migration herself, having moved to the US from Bosnia as a refugee from the Bosnian War.  She now divides h...

This episode is part of a mini series exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict.  Alice interviews Dr Lina Fadel , an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University. With a background in languages and intercultural studies, Lina’s research looks at how we navigate sameness and difference in multicultural contexts. She is particularly interested in how people reconstruct...

This episode is part of our mini series, exploring forced displacement as one of the many legacies of conflict. Research Assistant Dr Martyna Majewska interviews artist Mateusz (Mat) Fahrenholz , who shares his memories growing up in the Polish exile community in St Andrews, Fife, as the son of Polish war-time refugees. Mat's parents were both displaced from eastern Poland (now Ukraine) as a...

This episode kicks off a new series of podcasts exploring how we visualise forced displacement, one of the many legacies of war. Alice interviews artist Diana Forster about her new art installation, 'Somewhere to Stay', which narrates the story of her mother's forced migration from Poland to Scotland during WWII. Fellow guest Josef Butler (a PhD student at King's College, Londo...

In this episode, student Harris Siderfin (a member of the Visualising Peace project ) explores the role that youth-focused storytelling can play in reducing conflict and promoting the building blocks of a peaceful society. His guest is Rob Burnet, founder and CEO of Shujaaz Inc , a  multimedia youth platform based in Kenya that aims to help improve the lives and livelihoods of young people across...

In this week’s episode, two students from our Visualising Peace project - Harris Siderfin and Otilia Meden - talk to experts on space security. Dr Adam Bower is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations and Co-director of the Centre for Global Law and Governance. His research examines the intersection of international politics and law, and particularly the development, implementat...

This episode continues our mini-series looking at how children are socialised into recurring habits of visualising war and peace. Alice interviews Prof. J. Marshall Beier , who is Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. In the course of a distinguished career, Marshall's research has focused particularly on how children and childhood get conceived in...

In this podcast Alice interviews Dr Helen Berents , a senior research fellow in the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Helen’s research focuses on the involvement of children and young people in international conflict and peace-building processes, and she advocates strongly for wider recognition of their contributions and capacities in navigating v...

Alice's guest on this podcast is Dr Olga Boichak , a Ukrainian-born sociologist who works as a lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney. Editor of the Digital War Journal, Olga’s particular research interest is the war-media nexus. She has spent years studying participatory warfare in Ukraine, looking at how civilians have used mobile media and open-source intelligence to enga...

Please note: this episode was recorded before recent events in Ukraine. We stand in solidarity with everyone caught up in this terrible conflict, and our thoughts are particularly with its youngest victims. Children's voices on conflict matter more than ever at present. This episode is no. 50 in the series! Listeners might remember that our first guest on the podcast was Lady Lucy French, the...

In this week's episode, Alice interviews two well-known authors and policy advisers on Future warfare: Peter Warren Singer and August Cole . Peter is a Strategist at New America , Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and Principal at Useful Fiction LLC – a network of creators, thinkers and artists, who explore the potential of fiction and other media to forecast future trends. He...

In this week's episode, Alice interviews Dr David LaRocca , a philosopher by training but also an author and expert on cinema. Among other publications, he has edited volumes on the Philosophy of Documentary Film and on the Philosophy of War Films . In his book Metacinema: the form and content of filmic reference and reflexivity he discusses the self-conscious representation of different kind...

This week’s podcast continues our mini-series on visualising war through gaming. Alice and Nicolas’s guest is Dr Katarina Birkedal, who holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews; her thesis is entitled ‘Resistance, Reproduction, Attachment: Unsettling gender through cosplay.’ Until 2021, Katarina was postdoctoral Research fellow on the Visualising War project. Drawin...

In this episode, our postdoctoral research assistant Katarina Birkedal (2020-21) interviews Taliesin and Evitel, the couple behind the YouTube and Twitch channels of the same name. They offer commentary on the game World of Warcraft, as well as giving regular news updates on everything related to the game. Through a combination of humour and deep dive analyses, they enrich their viewers’ experienc...

In this week’s podcast, Alice and Nicolas talk with Dr Iain Donald . Iain is a Senior Lecturer in Game Production at Abertay University. His research explores commemoration and memorialization in videogames and interactive media as well as the intersection of games, digital media and history. Iain is also a skilled developer of video games. He has been involved in several award-winning Applied Gam...