Isaac Blacksin, a media theorist and an ethnographer of military conflict, has spent time in war-zones from Afghanistan to Ukraine. His writing appears in various scholarly and popular venues, including Media, War & Conflict, Applied Journalism and Media Studies, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, boundary 2, Viewpoint Magazine, Kyoto Journal, and Worlding Asia.
Isaac’s first book, Conflicted: Making News from Global War, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork with journalists in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the book challenges dominant conceptions of war by revealing how representational authority comes to be. Conflicted is the first ethnography of war reportage in the War on Terror era, and it offers the most comprehensive on-the-ground account of conflict journalism today. Conflicted shows why news of conflict, often presumed to function as a critique of excessive violence, instead serves to sanction official rationales for global war.
At CCLP, Isaac will continue his work on the coverage of war and the representation of civilian casualties.
Read more about Isaac’s work here