Solidarity has long been of interest within Cultural Studies, Migration Studies and the social sciences more broadly, but solidarity fatigue has received significantly less academic attention. Solidarity fatigue is defined here as a sense of psychological or physical exhaustion experienced by those expressing solidarity – support around a shared horizon of values. Building on the prominent political articulations of solidarity fatigue in central and Eastern European media in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this paper looks at how solidarity fatigue is communicated and expressed through 40 interviews conducted in the spring of 2024 with employees in a range of organisations that offered solidarity to displaced Ukrainians in Germany and Poland, including non-governmental and cultural organisations. A framework of solidarity through recognition is employed to contextualise such articulations among these interviewees, encompassing emotional, legal, and sociocultural dimensions.

This research focuses on 10 case studies drawn from a corpus of 50 interviews with displaced Ukrainian women based in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder and considers the extent to which Ukrainian refugee women arriving in Germany over the last two years might have experienced misrecognition within their everyday experiences. Following Honneth’s (1996) understanding of recognition in terms of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem, manifestations of recognition and misrecognition are centered around our Ukrainian interlocutors’ communicated experiences. Recognition or the lack thereof impacts our interlocutors’ sense of self and belonging in their new environments. According to our analysis, recognition manifested as ambivalent inclusion through recognition via [potential] employers, government officials or within interlocutors’ personal lives; it was equally highly contingent on interlocutors’ self-identification–personally (e.g. by their region of origin) or professionally (e.g. as activists, [prospective] employees), with obvious material (e.g. economic) and symbolic (communicative) components.

How are Western journalists who are killed in the course of their work remembered? Using the biographies of journalists killed covering conflict, this article investigates the discursive repertoires through which the memorialization of journalists killed while reporting conflict is accomplished. The authors argue that such journalists are consistently constructed as humanitarian, cosmopolitan witnesses engaged in supererogatory moral projects involving justice and voice for those outside of these journalists’ geopolitical home communities. This particular articulation appears to herald a recent shift in the memorialization of the journalistic dead, although it is continuous with longer discourses in fields such as photojournalism and its idea of the ‘concerned photographer’. We speculate that this shift is consistent with material changes in the field – in particular, the precaritization of conflict reporting driving journalists into the material and social world of professional humanitarianism, whose discourses around the moral worth and cosmopolitan nature of the work have colonized the subfield of conflict reporting.

Using data collected from participant observation through creative workshops in two regions of the UK in 2019 and 2020 with participants going through the asylum system, this paper seeks to redress the under-theorisation of Axel Honneth’s use of critical and psychoanalytic theory including the work of Donald Winnicott within Honneth’s book The Struggle for Recognition. Crucially, this approach sees Honneth’s primary intersubjective process of recognition, love, as ambivalent, as opposed to monolithically conceived, a common criticism of Honneth’s early work, and applies this conception to empirical data. Following the work of philosopher Amy Allen, this paper also resolves to apply Jessica Benjamin’s use of the Third to a number of empirical case studies relating to creative workshops conducted with participants going through the asylum system. By taking this ambivalent approach, this paper shows how meaningful recognition might more successfully be achieved beyond the limits of such the punitive regimes of asylum.

This paper draws on previous work in the fields of conflict studies and journalism studies, as well as empirical work by the authors on the normative language of conflict journalism to argue that this subfield of journalism appears to have increasingly ‘moved house’ from the normative universe of institutional journalism to that of professional humanitarianism. We describe three shifts that are taking (or have taken) place whose effects may include a transformation of ideas around ‘what conflict journalism is for’ and how it understands its presence in armed conflict.

Arts journalism, journalism on the arts and entertainment industries, has been primarily defined in a Western European context within Journalism Studies. Yet this neglects the globalised nature of arts and entertainment production and consumption and the mobile reporters who cover it, and the nationally contingent challenges and opportunities they face. In a world still grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, arts reporters face a triple threat: the precarity of what is often a freelance career, the financial disruption of the global media and entertainment industries, and the biases of a media ecosystem that favours reporters from the Global North. Drawing on 24 interviews with arts journalists from 12 different countries in four continents in 2020-2021, we explore how such journalists are increasingly subsidising their work with employment beyond the media sector. Arts journalists from Europe grapple with complex issues relating to their professional and personal identities, in contrast to journalists from the Global South, where questions relate primarily to economic and structural challenges. Journalists from West Africa interviewed face increasing if sporadic interest from media organisations in global economic centres, and the emerging content possibilities of internationally funded digital and streaming platforms, mirroring broader economic flows of capital and labour.