Behind the Headlines | Ukraine – changing how we bear witness to war

Recorded April 11, 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused
immense human suffering, a refugee crisis, the renewed spectre of
nuclear attack, and now, international outrage at evidence of war
crimes. How is an international media reporting on these horrific
developments? This panel discussion assesses the role of
traditional war correspondents, citizen journalists, and
open-source information, to ask how the ‘news’ stands witness to
the atrocities in Ukraine. Paul Cunningham is the Political
Correspondent (and former European Correspondent and Environmental
Correspondent) for RTÉ News and Current Affairs. He has been
reporting on the war in Ukraine, including live from the Medyka
border crossing between Ukraine and Poland. Paul is an
award-winning journalist and has covered conflict in a number of
countries, including Bosnia, Lebanon, Kosovo, Algeria,
Pakistan/Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nepal, Darfur, and Northern
Ireland. Orysia Kulick is an Assistant Professor in the Departments
of Political Studies and German and Slavic Studies at the
University of Manitoba. She previously held postdoctoral
fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, where she worked on an
EU-funded research project exploring the cultural heritage of
dissent in former socialist countries, and the University of
Toronto. She was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to
Ukraine, where she researched civic mobilisation in the 2004
presidential elections. Orysia is currently working on a book
provisionally title How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party
Politics after Stalin and a microhistory of the concentration camp
Mittelbau-Dora. Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in
Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications in DCU.
She researches threats to digital rights, networked
authoritarianism, internet freedom, and internet governance in
Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square:
Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield,
2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine
and Russia. Ciaran O’Connor is a disinformation and extremism
researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, working in the
Research and Policy unit, where he tracks and monitors
disinformation, hate and extremism online. He specialises in
researching extremist activity and communication across open and
closed networks and platforms through the use of open source
research methodologies. Mark Little is the Schuler Democracy Forum
Media Fellow in the Trinity Long Room Hub and co-founder and CEO of
Kinzen. Mark spent 20 years as a reporter and presenter for RTÉ and
won the Irish TV Journalist of the Year award for his reporting
from Afghanistan in 2001. He was the founder of Storyful, the
world’s first social news agency, and the former Vice President for
Media in Europe and Managing Director of Twitter International
Headquarters. In 2017, Mark co-founded Kinzen, which combines
editorial skills and artificial intelligence to protect online
conversations and communities. The event is hosted by the Schuler
Democracy Forum in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities
Research Institute. It is part of the 'Behind the Headlines’
discussion series supported by the John Pollard Foundation. Learn
more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/