*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

David Campbell is a writer, professor, and communications strategist, currently working as Managing Editor of VII Insider. He is Honorary Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and for more than twenty-five years he taught visual culture, geography, and politics at universities in the USA, Australia, and the UK. David is the author of six books and more than sixty articles, most notably Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (revised edition, 1998) and National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (1998). He has produced visual projects on the Bosnian War, imaging famine, and the visual economy of HIV/AIDS, and collaborates on photographic, multimedia and video projects — all his work can be seen on his website.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

I have a number of fields, as I discussed with Professor Roland Bleiker in a recent video interview. However, if my current, primary, field is understood as being concerned with the relationship between visuality and politics, especially international politics, then I think the most important questions and debates in this space concern the potential impact of images, how audiences consume images, and the effect of images on those audiences. Others will designate different issues as important, and I would not want to argue for the prioritisation of my concerns over all others, but I feel strongly that we have a lot more to know about the consumption and interpretation of images by audiences (and it is vital to stress the plurality of the idea of audiences, as there is no longer – if there ever was – a single, mass audience consuming or engaging media). We have done a lot of work on the production and circulation of images, but most arguments about the meaning and impact of images involve the projection of an analyst’s interpretation of what they could mean onto audiences. There are, of course, some social psychology experiments in this space, and in communications studies there is some audience research, but for critical International Relations scholars there is much more to do to build on those insights and make them relevant for the analysis of images in international politics. In the last year I have started to sketch out some thinking about this (see this online article from May 2021; free registration required) and I am working with friends and colleagues in the University of Queensland’s Research Program on Visual Politics to expand this work (see this online article from March 2022). 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking? 

That’s one large question! I think I would resist some of the question’s framing by saying I have never set out to understand “the world” in the sense of trying to find a single explanation or framework that could grasp a totality called “the world”. Most of all, and thinking well beyond my research agenda, I would say that the older I get the less I understand about contemporary politics generally. Watching events over the........

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