Media, Images, and War

Abstract: This symposium examines how media representations, visual imagery, and mediated communication shape meaning-making and public understanding during conflict and war. Focusing on the Israeli–Palestinian and related regional conflicts, the symposium brings together six studies that explore how platforms, images, narratives, and interpersonal communicative breakdowns mediate experiences of violence, identity, legitimacy, and future-oriented expectations in contexts of protracted conflict. Across diverse arenas of mediated interaction – including social media platforms, iconic war photography, religious news outlets, practices of digital witnessing, longitudinal news exposure, and diplomatic interpersonal encounters – the papers examine how conflict is symbolically constructed, contested, and negotiated. The contributions address how media, images, and communication are used to express collective narratives, frame enemies and victims, mobilize moral meanings, and shape public interpretation of unfolding events. The papers presented in this panel employ different approaches and methods to highlight media and communication as active forces in conflict dynamics rather than passive channels of transmission. They show how digital platforms enable new forms of expression and testimony, how visual images function as sites of symbolic struggle and recognition, how religious framing structures interpretations of war, how media environments cultivate divergent expectations about conflict trajectories, and how interpersonal communicative failures at the diplomatic level can generate friction and escalation.

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