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Bass Connections Project Teams:
- Digital/Visual Archives of War and Conflict (2025-2026)
- War and Digital Archives: The Israel-Gaza War and Beyond (2024-2025)
Rebecca Stein is in her second year of leading a Bass Connections team exploring the relationship between war, visual media and archiving, with a particular emphasis on the ways that wars have been witnessed, recorded and preserved on social media. Stein’s teams grew out of a partnership between Bass Connections and the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, which investigated topics related to geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises.
Stein also participated in a lunchtime conversation, Bass Connections for Humanists, in October 2025, where she and fellow panelists discussed the value of participating in interdisciplinary research through Bass Connections for faculty in the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences.
She shared her thoughts on her experiences as a team leader with Elizabeth Thompson (Assistant Director of Communications, Bass Connections) in March 2026.
How did the idea for your project team come about?
This idea emerged as part of a call for projects on geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises in the Middle East. Several of the teams were focused on the Israel/Gaza war and my project was one. It grew out of my three decades of research in Israel/Palestine — and more recently, a focus on the politics of visual and digital media in the context of the Israeli military occupation.
In the first year of the Bass Connections project, our team paid close attention to the production of wartime digital archives — in particular, the ways both Israelis and Palestinians were posting about their wartime experiences in real-time on social media, and the ways that such media was circulating globally. We were interested in how social media functioned as a highly varied wartime archive in the hands of multiple constituents and institutions, employed for a wide range of social and political ends: as tools of mourning, vehicles of witnessing protest, souvenirs of military conquest, tools of legal action in the international court system, and the list goes on. We placed our focus on these highly varied archival forms.
Were you considering the role of AI in this equation?
Yes. The Israel/Gaza war evolved alongside the development of generative AI. As such, the wartime archives we were studying became increasingly infused with synthetic images — developed and deployed by actors on all political sides, for a flexible range of purposes. Thus, the status of AI has been an enduring focus for our team with a particular focus on the question of how synthetic images challenge conventional notions of wartime witnessing. We’ve asked: is there still space for trust in the digital eyewitness in this AI-saturated environment? More recently, as we’ve turned our attention to the ways that such digital archives migrate into legal settings, we’ve asked: how is the growing prevalence of the synthetic image challenging legal conventions of evidence? How are courts across the world adapting to this new digital environment?
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What have you found most rewarding about working with students and colleagues in this collaborative, interdisciplinary format?
It has been very powerful, for both me and the students, to have the opportunity to study a rapidly changing political environment in real time. The flexibility of the Bass Connections model has made this possible.
Our project has morphed and evolved alongside this changing political landscape. This spring, we watched as the very questions about conflict, state violence and the digital archive that we had studied in Israel/Palestine came alive within the streets of the U.S. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — and all the activism and public conversation that unfolded alongside the massive body of bystander footage — we shifted our attention to this domestic arena. We have had the luxury to speak with numerous experts about these unfolding events — exploring everything from the legal criteria that make digital videos admissible in court, the legal protections afforded bystander videographers and the growing importance of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) in legal environments. Our project has followed the changing moment, and it has been a very exciting opportunity for everyone involved.
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What advice would you give colleagues in the social sciences or humanities who are interested in proposing a project team?
Bass Connections teams led by scholars in the humanities and interpretative social sciences are still somewhat rare. I would say to my colleagues: follow your passions! Bass Connections provides an incredible environment and infrastructure to work in a vertically integrated way with students and to share your research passions with them.
What are some of the exciting outcomes you've seen so far for your own scholarship and the academic careers of your students?
My own scholarship has benefited greatly from this opportunity. I came into Bass Connections with a nascent project on digital archives of war in the Israel/Gaza context and the team provided me with the framework to develop this project further. I will be working on the book version of this project next year as a 2026-2027 Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
I have already had one student, Jillian Vordick, change career paths as a result of our collaborative work, which was very exciting to see! I expect great things from my students and look forward to seeing the varying ways that our collective work might shape their future paths.
Learn More
- Read more about Jillian Vordick's (Class of 2025) experience on this Bass Connections team,
- Browse summaries and outcomes from all nine 2024-2025 pop-up teams focused on geopolitical crises and humanitarian response.
- Read more advice from faculty who have led Bass Connections teams.