Children, Media, and Conflict Zones Lab

The Children, Youth, and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones initiative aims to help fill a scholarly void to best explore how media may be used to play meaningful roles in the lives of children and youth in conflict zones. To achieve its aims, the Initiative established a Children, Media, and Conflict Zones Lab. Created by Founding Director, Yael Warshel, the lab carries out its work through transdisciplinary global collaborations. Initiative Rationale and Aims: Children and youth comprise the majority of conflict zones. Since it they who are most impacted, this initiative aims to shine the spotlight on media rights and uses that best aid and empower children and youth. Media constitute relatively accessible and non-threatening tools for intervention, yet scholarship does not adequately address the roles they play and could play for those who live in conflict zones, are displaced by, and/or produced by them. Initiative Scope Owed to the lack of scholarship addressing children, youth and media in international and global conflict zones, the initiative aims to promote analyses of the following: 1. Children, conflict zones, and media as artifacts: the critical understanding of children and youth’s everyday lives, artifact/technology-based uses, practices, reception, and production of media in conflict zones, including as alternative measures of public opinion. 2. Children, conflict zones and media as intervention: the assessment and evaluation of how children and youth are social-psychologically and biologically affected and structurally impacted by peace communication interventions. 3. Children, conflict zones and media as contents: the critical interpretation of how news, film, and NGO professionals cover and fundraise on behalf of children in conflict zones.