Framing Terror: Screen Violence, Memory, and the Ethics of Looking

Co-ordinator: Dr Elena Caoduro, Queen’s University Belfast

This half-day symposium brings together scholars in film and media studies to explore how political violence and terrorism are represented on screen. Focusing on both fiction and documentary, the event interrogates the aesthetic and ethical challenges of depicting trauma, radicalism, and extremist ideologies.

Participants will examine how screen media shape public memory, mobilise affect, and navigate the complexities of justice, resistance, and complicity in visual storytelling.

The event aims to foster dialogue across research on gender, spectatorship, extremism, and memory politics in global screen cultures.

Dr Elena Caoduro is a Sabbatical Fellow at the Mitchell Institute and a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Queen’s University Belfast.

Her research examines the intersections of cinema, cultural memory, nostalgia, and political violence, with a focus on European screen cultures. She is preparing her forthcoming monograph Retro Terror in German and Italian Cinema: Memory, Nostalgia and Left-Wing Terrorism for Edinburgh University Press.

Her publications include the edited collections: Documenting Fashion (EUP, 2023) and Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2021). Elena teaches across film studies and broadcast production, with a particular focus on gender, media, and contemporary screen culture.

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