The panellists will discuss the role of art and visual representation in response to conflict and dealing with its consequences.

Text Illuminations is an art installation by artist Nela Milic of the University of the Arts London (UAL) produced through inter-disciplinary collaboration with political scientists Dr Denisa Kostovicova, Dr Ivor Sokolic and Tom Paskhalis of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

This artwork is an interactive representation of a search for the meaning of reconciliation after mass atrocity through debates including people from all ethnic groups involved in a decade of conflicts in the Balkans. The artist and the political scientists join together to discuss the process of interdisciplinary collaboration to convert quantitative text analysis into art. The exhibition is part of a major AHRC-funded project, ‘Art & Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community’, led by King’s in collaboration with the University of the Arts London and the London School of Economics.

The work will be contextualised in relation to the early findings of a DFID-funded project, the Conflict Research Programme, led by LSE, which explores conflict in relation to notions of identity, civicness and the political marketplace. Contemporary conflicts often combine attacks on civil society, culture and cultural heritage. The panel will also explore how, in responding to this civicness, art and the defence of cultural heritage can come together.

Denisa Kostovicova is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at the European Institute and the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice with a particular interest in the bottom-up perspective on transitions from war to peace. 

Nela Milic is an artist and an academic working in media and arts, and is Senior Lecturer and Year 2 Contextual and Theoretical Studies Coordinator in the Design School at London College of Communication.

Tom Paskhalis is a PhD candidate at the Department of Methodology, LSE. His research is focussed on comparative politics and the development and application of new approaches to quantitative text analysis.

Dr Ivor Sokolić is a Research Officer at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on the ERC funded project “Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups”. 

Denisa Kostovicova, Ivor Sokolic, Tom Paskhalis and Nela Milic discuss the process of interdisciplinary collaboration, which turned a political science method into an art installation in their blog piece Text Illuminations: From the Method to the Artefact.

Henry Radice is a Reseach Fellow in the Department of International Development, LSE.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival #NewWorldDisorders

This event is part of the LSE Festival: New World (Dis)Orders running from Monday 25 February to Saturday 2 March 2019, with a series of events exploring how social science can tackle global problems.