Isaac Blacksin is a media theorist and an ethnographer of military conflict. He received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. Operating at the convergence of cultural anthropology, critical theory, and media studies, his research examines the politics of representation and the practice of journalism in conditions of violence. Isaac was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at USC.
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.
Isaac’s fieldwork in warzones from Afghanistan to Ukraine has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Humanities Research at the University of California. 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 in Worlding Asia. Isaac’s current projects concern the figure of the civilian casualty in conceptions of contemporary warfare and the exchange of ideas and technologies between cinematic and military institutions.
Contact Isaac at blacksin@usc.edu