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Abstract

In recent years several commentators have observed the trend of mainstream media ignoring and distorting women’s perspectives and experiences in armed conflicts. Both in the reporting and the wider discourse about conflicts, women tend to be cast less as political actors and more as helpless victims, often paired with children in accounts of war incidents. Carolina Marques de Mesquita (2016), in her study of media coverage of recent wars and conflicts, observed that while major media outlets tend to represent the scale of violence in a conflict through the harm and death inflicted on women, they are otherwise often neglected. This contention sets the backdrop for our study that aims to explore the Russian-Ukraine War from a gendered lens. We examine the coverage of the ongoing conflict in four news outlets to see whether or not they reflect the established pattern of gendered representations of war. Our analysis reveals, by and large, persistence in the pattern of coverage of the war that corroborates the charge that media reportage of conflict tends to underrepresent women and distort their involvement in wars through narrow role characterizations.

Author Biography

Ayo Oyeleye is Associate Professor of Mass Communication at United Arab Emirates University. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Leicester in 1990. He is an active researcher and has broad experience of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate studies, as well as supervision of MPhil and Ph.D. research studies. Prior to joining the UAEU, he was at the Birmingham City University, UK where he worked for more than twenty years and led the media postgraduate suite of programs. Ayo’s current teaching and research interests are in the areas of international communication; media of diaspora; global journalism; human communication; and communication for social change, sustainable development, and social justice. Email ID: ayo.oyeleye@uaeu.ac.ae

Shujun Jiang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Creative Industries at UAEU. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the City University of Hong Kong (2008) and her M.A. in journalism and communication from Tsinghua University, China (2004). She was also a visiting scholar at Syracuse University in 2006. Her research interests include new media studies, social media studies, and journalism studies. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and presented in many international conferences. Email ID: shujun.jiang@uaeu.ac.ae

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