WARSHARE PhD Scholarship (3)

Late applications cannot be accepted. Project: Following a European Advanced Grant Award, funded by UKRI, to Professor Andrew Hoskins, for his project: WARSHARE: The New War Front: Digital Participation in War, he is now recruiting a research team, including three PhD scholarships to begin in September 2026. Two of these scholarship positions have been appointed, with the one remaining the subject of this advert. The students appointed in these scholarship positions will collaborate and contribute as members of the research team on this project. Project summary: The battle over representations and perceptions of war is transformed in an era of billions of images, videos and other digital content of war being produced, shared, edited, liked, linked, fabricated and deleted on smartphones, social media platforms and messaging apps. War in the twenty-first century is participative. People can record and document war, and unwittingly and deliberately transmit data points that can generate targets on the battlefield. Smart devices are both a way to represent war and a node in its practice. This project will produce new interdisciplinary understanding of how and why digital participation is transforming how individuals and societies (including militaries and states) fight, experience, and understand (perceive, explain, and de/legitimise) warfare. It will illuminate how smart devices, apps and platforms enable a wide range of actors – militaries, states, journalists, NGOs, private companies, soldiers, citizens, victims – to participate in warfare in an immediate and ongoing fashion. At the same time, this project engages the revolution in machine-learning and AI methods which enable mining and measuring of online behaviour at scale, and the illumination of multiple modes of communication (messages, images, video, memes and emojiis) that together shape participation and meaning in warfare. In experimenting with AI and machine learning methods, it will break new interdisciplinary ground (social and computing science, art, visual, media and communication studies) to test what kinds of knowledge about twenty-first century participative war (how it is fought, experienced, contested, legitimized, and remembered, for multiple actors) can be acquired and used. It takes the hybrid messenger service/social media platform of Telegram as its principal case study, an unbounded ‘new war front’, central to the waging and experiencing of the 2022- Russian war against Ukraine. The University reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to amend or withdraw any of the advertised scholarships, without notice. Scholarship 3 project details: Remembering and forgetting through digital trajectories of war How does participative warfare shape memory and accountability? This research will track and show what and how digital images of twenty-first century war are collected, stored, archived, erased, lost, remembered and forgotten. Key objectives: Identify which key current images of war and past images of war (used as templates- types, numbers, proportion) decline or disappear over time in a sample of channels in Telegram, to the 2022- Russian-Ukrainian war. Identify who and how is using, storing, archiving digital images of war, and to what ends. Interrogate the participative production, distribution and capture of messages, images and videos at new scale, to explore potential pathways to legal action and accountability. It comprises three case studies: Case study 1: Individual remembering and forgetting: This case study employs a typical experimental psychology approach to test and retest for individual retention of memory of information about and experiences of digitally mediated war. Case study 2: Social and cultural remembering and forgetting: This case study will track the calls for and uses of social and cultural remembering emerging from participative war in Ukraine and Russia, tracking a ‘radicalisation of memory’ (Hoskins) to probe how social media pl…