The Truth (?) of Wartime Rape: Memory, Form, and Meaning in Helke Sander's Liberators Take Liberties and Wojciech Tochman's Today We're Going to Draw Death.

This article analyzes the representational strategies used to show, narrate, and contextualize sexual violence during past military conflicts in Helke Sander's 1992 documentary film BeFreier und BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties) and Wojciech Tochman's 2010 reportage Dzisiaj narysujemy smierc (Today We're Going to Draw Death). My comparative analysis of the formal strategies used by Sander and Tochman to effectively diminish various modes of "historical distance" serves to promote a discussion on the potential of each medium to evoke empathetic understanding of the trauma of wartime rape victims in the present.

The Right (Way) to Represent: The Emotional Politics of Remembering Mass Rape in Germany After 1945.

A Woman in Berlin (1954) has undoubtedly shaped global understanding of wartime rape. The present article focuses on the diarist's use of humor to process her disorientation, assert her subjectivity, and build affective links with other victims. I consider how the diary's tone influenced its reception and thus how aesthetic analysis might illuminate the conditions under which stories about sexual violence become audible, as well as the ways in which the "cultural politics of emotion" (to quote the title of Sarah Ahmed's 2004 study) can both foster and obstruct human rights projects.

Frames and knowledge in mixed media: how activation changes information intake.

Many people consider strategic framing, the journalistic tendency to reduce politics to a game or competition focused on the tactical maneuvers of political actors, to be harmful to democracy because it erodes citizen interest in the democratic process. Our results demonstrate that this is not always the case. Testing the effects of textual strategic frames and video processing in a digital environment, we show that strategic frames may also provide a context that is more conducive to learning in mixed media news environments than that provided by value frames, those focused on the value conflict between principled policy opponents. Further analysis reveals that this effect is most clearly seen among people who read political blogs (i.e., those who are already active and interested in politics). Our data suggest that for individuals with cognitive networks built around ideological concerns, such as blog readers, value-framed messages provide cues to stop encoding new information, while strategically framed messages lead people to continue absorbing and learning in mixed media environments.