Isaac Blacksin
Biographic Data
| ID | 910234 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isaac Blacksin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isaac |
| FAMILY NAME | Blacksin |
| SIGNATURE | BLACKSIN I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8848-924X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 6 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Entangled knowledge
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with journalists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Ukraine, this article tracks the complex of aims and motivations that attend to the documentation of human suffering. Compassion and profit, reflexivity and objectivity, personal growth and professional pressure: the investments of wartime representation are often in tension. This article constellates the author’s personal encounters with war and conflict…
Extermination as Protection
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with international war reporters, this article interrogates dominant meanings for warfare and for the civilian death that results. It takes as a case study the 2016 to 2017 battle for Mosul, Iraq. Lauded reportage from Mosul revealed official underestimates of US-caused civilian harm in anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism's ability to "speak truth to power." Yet in questioning official death ta…
Straddlers not spiralists
This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Consid…
Agitation at the margins
The confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, th…
Death’s common sense
In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the import…
Brown Now
This special issue introduction addresses the current stakes and possibilities of the work of Norman O. Brown. Beginning with a reflection on a recent Norman O. Brown conference, the introduction elaborates Brown's major theoretical interventions before providing brief synopses of the essays included in the special issue
Straddlers not spiralists
This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Consid…
Death’s common sense
In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the import…
Agitation at the margins
The confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, th…
Death’s common sense
In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the import…
Brown Now
This special issue introduction addresses the current stakes and possibilities of the work of Norman O. Brown. Beginning with a reflection on a recent Norman O. Brown conference, the introduction elaborates Brown's major theoretical interventions before providing brief synopses of the essays included in the special issue
Straddlers not spiralists
This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Consid…
Extermination as Protection
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with international war reporters, this article interrogates dominant meanings for warfare and for the civilian death that results. It takes as a case study the 2016 to 2017 battle for Mosul, Iraq. Lauded reportage from Mosul revealed official underestimates of US-caused civilian harm in anti-Islamic State operations, exemplifying journalism's ability to "speak truth to power." Yet in questioning official death ta…
Entangled knowledge
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with journalists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Ukraine, this article tracks the complex of aims and motivations that attend to the documentation of human suffering. Compassion and profit, reflexivity and objectivity, personal growth and professional pressure: the investments of wartime representation are often in tension. This article constellates the author’s personal encounters with war and conflict…
Political science (5 works) · Journalism (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · History (3 works) · Media studies (3 works) · Art (2 works) · Ethnography (2 works) · Global Security and Public Health (2 works) · History (2 works) · Law (2 works)