Description
Given the increasing fragmentation of the online ecosystem shaped by authoritarian state interventions and platform logics, the digital realities of wars also become splintered. Focusing on Russia's war on Ukraine, I investigate the digital communicative acts of citizens and their impact on wartime knowledge production. I argue that citizens' affective media practices are central to establishing epistemic agency in the context of participatory warfare. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Ukrainian social media spaces during Russia's invasion, I reflect on how such media practices are strategically adopted and enacted by citizens in wartime. In order for these practices to coalesce into sustainable infrastructures of knowing that support epistemic authority, citizens combine repertoires of narrative resistance and tactics of algorithmic agency. Such affective practices aim to contest grand geopolitical war narratives and the 'West-splaining' that tends to dominate wartime knowledge production, reshaping how embodied knowledge of war circulates in global networks.
