Visualising War and Peace
How do war stories work? And what do they do to us? Join University of St Andrews historian Alice König and colleagues as they explore how war and peace get presented in art, text, film and music. With the help of expert guests, they unpick conflict stories from all sorts of different periods and places. And they ask how the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and war influence us as individuals and shape the societies we live in.
Visualising War and Peace
Never Such Innnocence with Lady Lucy French
In this episode, Alice and Nicolas interview Lady Lucy French, OBE, about Never Such Innocence, a charity she founded in 2014 to give children and young people a voice on conflict. Participants come from all around the globe and they use art, public speaking, poetry and song to share how they feel about war and its impacts. Through workshops, community events and public award ceremonies, Never Such Innocences ensures that these young voices are heard by politicians, policy-makers and Armed Forces personnel, among others; world leaders have even begun to sit up and take notice. We are excited to share what we learnt about Never Such Innocence's mission and how they have been empowering children to change the ways we visualise war and peace.
Among other questions, we asked:
- Why is it important to give children a voice on conflict?
- How do children in different parts of the world define and understand conflict?
- What aspects of conflict do children and young people tend to highlight?
- Do they communicate different things in art compared with song, or poetry compared with speech writing?
- What kinds of audience can they reach?
- What can adults learn from children about conflict?
If you would like to see the images or read the full poems discussed in this podcast episode, you can find bonus material on our project blog. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kTUV6BqUU. To get in touch with the Never Such Innocence project or find out more about their past work and upcoming aims, please have a look on their website.
For more information about individuals and their projects, access to resources and more, please have a look on the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin