Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Ana Paula da Rosa, visiting researcher from Unisinos, Brazil

This work seeks to investigate the process of circulation of images in an attempt to understand the role they play in the production of meanings about the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, considering the mediatization logics that pervade and configure them. Thus, we take as a starting point: a) the changes in the conditions of circulation and circularity of the discourses of and about the war from the access made possible by the web and 2) the complexifications of the communicational process itself from the images in flow and from its operations. In order to understand how the operations of meaning and visibility take place, this article analyzes a set of audiovisual materials (photographs, videos, and posts) that approach the routine of war (the front) and the effects of war (the bodies, the devastation). Such materials were widely inserted in digital, journalistic, and social media devices all over the world, including in Brazil. This text proposes to strain what these images do as meaning operations. What kind of conflict does emerge from this body-image relationship and to what extent is the war shaped by strategies of making visible and then erasing? As an initial proposal, we identified different image-operations grouped into three axes: image-trick; circuit-image, and resistance-image. Such operations show circulation as a value relation in interactions, which remodels the complexity of the ongoing conflict since it is crossed by multiple discursive layers that reveal the logic of mediatization employed to show/construct the war and its different forms and effects. As theoretical contributions, we mobilize in this work the concepts of circulation from Fausto Neto (2013, 2020) and Rosa (2017, 2020); Braga's interactional circuits (2012; 2014) and approaches to mediatized conflicts developed by Hjavard and Mortensen (2015), as well as Göran and Ståhlberg (2022). Furthermore, regarding the image, the perspectives of Didi Hubermann (2012) and Dietmar Kamper (2016) are adopted as keys to thinking about both what images do and what we do with them, especially observing the survival of symbolic elements around the world in a long time (Warburg,2016).

Keywords: mediatization; images; conflicts.

Ana Paula da Rosa is a professor in Communication Science at Unisinos University (Brazil) and visiting research at Sördetörn University by Project Capes/STINT. Her research focuses on mediatization, more especifically on the circulation of images and imaginaries. Since 2019, Ana Paula has coordinated the Master's and Doctoral program at UNISINOS and also acts as a professor and researcher in the Mediatization and Social Processes research line. The text to be presented is the initial part of a research project under development within the Communication and Difference axis of the Capes/ Stint Project, which seeks to investigate the logic of mediatization in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, considering images as operations. Ana's main research interests include mediatization studies; circulation and media discourses; images and imaginaries; conflicts ; conditions of recognition and social vulnerabilities.

It is possible to participate in the seminar both live on campus or digitally via Zoom. For more information, please contact saga.hansen@sh.se.