Public Engagement

Our research has important real-world applications: in studying past and present war stories, we can raise awareness of the powerful ideologies which they generate over time; and we can also build capacity in individuals and groups to harness some of the narratives of war that circulate in society to help prevent or mitigate against the effects of future conflict. To this end, we are working to develop a range of knowledge exchange activities and collaborations with journalists, documentary and film makers, artists, storytellers, museum curators, gaming experts, NGOs, peace activists, politicians/policy-makers, military personnel, veterans, victims of conflict, and the wider community. You can hear us talk more about our plans here.

In April 2021 we launched the Visualising War podcast. In each episode, we interview a range of academic and non-academic experts to raise awareness of how war stories work, what they do, and how they shape individuals’ and groups’ experiences of and conduct in war. We publish regular blogs in connection with the podcast series.

We have recently collaborated with a professional theatre company, NMT Automatics, to support their development of a new play which weaves ancient and modern war stories together. With their help, we are looking more widely at habits of dramatising war on stage and on screen, and also exploring the impact which the retelling of historic battle narratives (e.g. from Homer’s Iliad) continues to have on the ways in which people think and feel about war today. For a flavour of what we are doing, you can listen to us discussing the project at the Edinburgh Festival here; members of NMTA also talk about the project in this podcast. This project is being run in collaboration with the School of Classics’ Centre for the Public Understanding of Greek and Roman Drama.

In 2022, Alice König secured funding to work with artist Diana Forster on the development of a touring exhibition that looks at how we visualise the rupture of forced displacement. This initiative asks a question of great contemporary importance: how can we understand what it is like to be displaced from one’s home by conflict? Through a range of historic and 21st-century stories, we have been amplifying the voices of people who have experienced forced migration from antiquity to the present day. Our aim is to generate inclusive, reflective conversations about how we grasp and represent the different forms of rupture, journeying and home-making which forced migrants have to deal with on a daily basis, all around the world. More details can be found via the project website, Visualising Forced Migration.

The art exhibition detailed above has prompted to us collaborate with educational charity Never Such Innocence to host workshops for local schools, offering young people an opportunity to contribute to wide-ranging conversations on conflict. We have also collaborated with NSI to host school workshops in connection with a photography exhibition we hosted in 2023, featuring the award-winning work of journalist Hugh Kinsella Cunningham. Picturing Peace in Congo highlights the work of the Women’s Peace Movement in the DRC.

Following on from this work, we launched a survey for school teachers to find out how war in general and specific wars in particular are typically taught in schools. The results of this research is informing further dialogue and research on current trends and future opportunities for teaching war and peace at different educational stages. It is also feeding into wider research on the forces that shape children’s habits of visualising both war and peace.

In addition, various members of the Visualising War Research Group are engaged in knowledge exchange and outreach activities of their own, for example: