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Saturday, November 12
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ARS18
PerformingMilitary Identities and Communities Through theMedia
B. O'Loughlin
1
1
Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
This panel brings together a number of authors and editors who originally contributed to a Special Issue on ‘Contemporary soldiering, self-representation
and popular culture’for Media,War and Conflict (published in April 2016).We hope to build on our initial explorations of the more personalized and popular
mediations of war and here re-focus our attention on audiences, identity construction and participation.The panel brings together researchers from the UK,
US and Sweden, and intentionally focuses on a range of media forms to avoid a one-medium bias. Our special issue’s focus was very much on the lived expe‑
riences of military personnel as articulated and understood across a diverse range of media forms and genres. In this panel we further scrutinise the political
and affective work prompted by varied media materials through analyses of the spaces where soldiers, veterans and supporters performmilitary identities
or communities. Such scrutiny remains crucial to investigating how war and violence are legitimized and remembered. Notwithstanding the continuing
pervasiveness of traditional media institutions, information about war and its protagonists is created and accessed through varied devices, platforms and
networks, which, rather than simply negating the ideologies of mass media, are embedded with their own ideologies (through their very claims of ‘direct’
communication and disruptions to gatekeeping practices, for instance).This means it is more important than ever to pay attention to the processes of medi‑
ation (including‘reception’), and the variations between different media genres and formats in the study of war and conflict. The contributions contained in
this panel thus engage with the tensions between official narratives and performances of lived experience, and the degree to which new subjectivities are
constituted and negotiated through participation in discursive spaces (online and offline). The papers cover a range of media forms: online forums (Maltby
and Thornham), NGO materials (Millar), ‘crowd-sourced’ digital storytelling (Silvestri), blogs (Hellman), and television shows (Parry and Thumim). They
also employ an array of methodological approaches including interviews, focus groups, critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Taken together,
they allow us to consider: the motivations behind those producing and sharing materials designed to represent the experiences of soldiering, the extent
to which there is scope to challenge dominant power relations, and how new media technologies create new dangers and opportunities for participants,
audiences and interested observers. As a founding co-editor of Media War & Conflict we are delighted that Professor Ben O’Loughlin (Royal Holloway) will
act as a respondent for our panel.
PN 323
‘They Need Our Help’: Non-Governmental Organizations and the Subjectifying Dynamics of the Military as Social Cause
K. Millar
1
1
Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom
The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan spurred a range of popular activity – from anti-war protests to war boosterism to veterans’ advocacy – purport‑
ing to “support the troops”. Non-governmental organizations, from veterans’ welfare organizations to anti-war groups, are crucial to this transformation
of “the troops” into a social cause and matter of collective concern. As such, this paper proposes an initial qualification of NGO representative practices as
a form of media genre, characterized by striking similarity in presentation, structure, and particularly explicitly normative tone. A critical discursive approach
is utilized to examine the implications of this genre for the production of subjectivities and power relations inherent to“supporting the troops”via a struc‑
tured analysis of the public-produced texts of a selection of typologically-identified NGOs in the United States and United Kingdom. The paper goes on to
examine the political implications of these representations, highlighting their implicit construction of their intended audience, and the way the identity
of this audience depends upon the counterintuitive objectification of the "supported" troops. It is argued that within the context of the liberal state, the rep‑
resentations of support produced across the advocacy spectrum work to not only depoliticize conflict but to “apoliticize”support for the troops as a matter
of morality. The paper concludes with a reflection upon the relationship between the discursive subjects created by the NGOs' representative practices, and
the "actual" political positions and behaviour evidenced by supporters, as a means of substantiating audience reception.
PN 324
Mining the Military: The Affordances of Online Military Forums
S. Maltby
1
, H. Thornham
2
1
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
2
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
This paper explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of visible, public, yet discursively intimately performances of mili‑
tary identity and sites of distinct power relations that, by virtue of their visibility inform, frame, appropriate and monetize the military community in par‑
ticular ways.The paper draws on data collected from British military forums (Arrse, Navynet, Rear Party) and the organisations that own and manage them.
We consider the discursive online practices within the forums, and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymity’ (or what we define
more accurately as pseudonymity) act as a critical interface between the military community who contribute to the content, and non-military observers
who read, access, mine and appropriate the content for political and economic gain. In so doing, we reveal the tensions between these seemingly private
yet extremely public online spaces arguing that the illusion of invisibility, anonymity and privacy has two related critical consequences. First, they enable
and facilitate a pre-existing, imaginary performance of a collective military identity that does not always resonate with the one that the British military
seek to project but which becomes partially mitigated by the very pseudonymity that facilitates it. Second, by virtue of the relative safety of pseudoynmity
and the performative community that results, those who manage, moderate, control the forums pro-actively construct ‘their’military forum community as
politically, economically and commercial viable.