Nina Grønlykke Mollerup

Project title

Views of violence - Images as documentary, evidentiary and affective

What is your project about?

The project investigates images of violence and takes a point of departure in a paradox surrounding these, namely that perpetrators of violence on the one hand often try to prevent others from filming while they at the same time film the violence themselves. This tells us that locations of cameras, intentions behind filming and modes of filming – what the project calls 'views of violence' – matters. The project examines how views of violence affect the way the images are used to establish knowledge in journalistic, judicial and wider public contexts. The project is carried out in collaboration with pioneering civil society organisations in the field, namely Bellingcat, Mnemonic, WITNESS, International Media Support (IMS) and Amnesty International's Citizen Evidence Lab.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

In 2008, I did fieldwork at various international media offices in Cairo and Damascus and remember the hassle of dragging heavy cameras around and journalists' phone conversations with fixers, for example about a violent event that even the fixers had not witnessed. Today, journalists – and the rest of us – often have access to images of such events, at times because people risk their lives to film them. It made a deep impression on me to experience how much people risk to film, first through my PhD fieldwork during the uprising in Egypt and later through my work with Syrian photographers. But even if images enable a different kind of knowledge, they do not simply provide an unfiltered access to truth. And they are actively used by many different actors, including perpetrators, in many respects. It is this complexity that the project explores.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

An important challenge we will face in the project is to ensure mental health – both for ourselves and for the people we work with. It is hard to work with images of violence and images can be traumatizing to look at even if you are not exposed to the violence. It is thus both part of our research object and an ethical and methodological challenge in the project. The issues we work with are important and urgent because images of violence carry potential for justice, memories and knowledge. Therefore, it is crucial that the project produces knowledge in collaboration with key players who help to break the boundaries of what images can be used for – and who can also benefit directly from the knowledge the project produces.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

The project will create new knowledge about how images and their origins contribute to accountability, justice and the work for human rights. The project will primarily have a broader impact by strengthening the work of our partners. In today's rapidly changing image landscape, there are many different actors who influence the social life of images, including many who have neither an interest in nor knowledge of images of violence. This means that the legal, ethical, technical and commercial issues that images of violence raise are often handled without regard to the complexities surrounding them. This project can, for example, contribute to the work to use perpetrator images as legal evidence, while reducing the risk of people arbitrarily being confronted with traumatizing images and the risk of important evidence being deleted by private companies that do not see the evidentiary value.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

I am very honoured and proud to be included in the line of Sapere Aude recipients. First of all, it enables me to take charge of the direction of my research and build a research environment that will help define a field of research which is developing at tremendous speed right now. It also gives me the opportunity to strengthen the relations between the university and important civil society organisations, which will contribute to ensuring the relevance and applicability of my research, while also giving me the opportunity to draw on relevant and current cases in my teaching. This grant will furthermore create fertile ground for other research projects, as the topic we are investigating will continue to become more relevant.

Background and personal life

I think there is a good correspondence between the researcher and the person behind it. I am very committed to issues of justice and love to expand my knowledge about the world. Otherwise, I'm quite boring and I'm married to a man who is almost as boring – but fortunately our two daughters are a lot of fun.