Fellow 2024

INDEX-IWM - Autumn 2024 1 – 30 September 2024

Johana Kotišová is a media researcher, educator, and author born in the Czech Republic and currently based in Brussels. Her research and teaching interests include conflict and crisis reporting and documentation, media professionals’ emotional labour and mental well-being, transnational media collaborations, media oligarchisation, and cultural journalism.

Project: Journalists vs. Impunity: Epistemological practices and challenges of media professionals investigating war crimes

The project seeks to understand the work of journalists and other media professionals investigating war crimes. While there have long been globally operating initiatives collecting evidence of war crimes and relying heavily on open-source investigations (OSINV), the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine led to further institutionalization (and transnationalization) of journalistic war crime investigations through on-the-ground documentation of war crime evidence and its digital archiving.

This phenomenon––journalists stepping into legal or criminal investigations––takes diverse forms and brings about many complexities and potential points of friction: the combination of journalistic professionalism with legal and criminal discourses, a variety of epistemological practices and tools, ethical questions, and mental well-being challenges. This INDEX project thus seeks to understand how journalists working on war crimes investigations operate simultaneously in the court of public opinion and the courts of law, and what questions and challenges they face.

Johana Kotišová

Johana Kotišová is Assistant Professor in Documentary and Journalism at the University of Amsterdam. She has a background in journalism, social anthropology, and sociology. Johana’s research interests include crisis and conflict reporting, media professionals’ safety, emotional labour, and mental well-being.

Her work has been published in journals such as Journalism, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism Studies, and European Journal of Communication. She is the book reviews editor of Media, War and Conflict. Besides her academic work, Johana works with creative professionals as a mental well-being counsellor.