Richard Stupart

RICHARD STUPART

Journalist

Location: LONDON & SOUTH SUDAN

BSc 2004 (Computer Science), BSc Hons 2005

“The first time I travelled was across South Africa for the Wits Debating Union in the early 2000s. We visited schools as a result of the NGO LoveLife sponsoring debating (and, indirectly, us),” says Richard Stupart, photographer and PhD researcher in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics.

For his PhD he is researching the discourse and practice of “bearing witness” by journalists in geopolitical conflicts, notably in South Sudan. His interest in the idea was ignited at Wits and through the Debating Union. “It was the first environment I encountered where it was possible to really start to reflect on the world I lived in and develop relationships with people I would never have met otherwise.”

On the debating trips around South Africa, he says, he saw “how apartheid spatial planning had been written into every tiny town and large city. This led to long conversations with the other debaters from all walks of life, which were easily as educational as anything I was learning in my formal classes.”

After his Honours, Richard ran a small company in software development and hosting for a few years. “The money was good but at some point I had an existential crisis about what I was doing with my life. I was finding the whole being-a-coder enterprise fairly meaningless, morally and politically speaking. So I packed up and went backpacking from Cape Town to Cairo on public transport for three months.”

This influenced his decision to pursue his Master’s in Media Studies at Rhodes University in 2012, followed by a second Master’s in Public Policy and Conflict at Universität Erfurt, Germany, in 2015. “I realised that I was interested in the broader questions about how journalism is done. So I researched media coverage of the 2011 famine in Somalia, but also travelled independently to northern Uganda and later to the Ituri district of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both experiences made me think much more about the sociological universe in which peacekeepers, journalists and humanitarians do their work.”

In 2012 he moved to London with his partner, Katherine Furman (whom he met at a debating competition), when she started her PhD in Philosophy at the London School of Economics. “Katherine is currently a lecturer at the University College Cork, and I’m at the LSE. So we have had to become good at making weekend travel plans,” he says. “One of the major headaches of being in a relationship where both of us are academics is to find work in the same city. Among academics this situation is so prevalent that it’s been given its own name – the two-body problem. In time, it’d be nice to actually live in the same place again.”

For his fieldwork he travelled to South Sudan in the early part of 2018, where he stayed in the capital, Juba, and a site in Malakal where UN peacekeepers are effectively being asked to keep 20000 civilians safe from the government. On this visit he directly encountered state repression of the media.

In his research he is questioning what justifies witnessing the suffering of others, what obligations we have to speak about injustices we are aware of, and the ethics and purpose of journalism. “For all of the crises about fake news and the role of journalists in the world, there is a point to be made about how certain forms of journalism are fundamentally an ethical form of work through which society comes to know itself, know what is unjust, and thereby have the opportunity to improve. These tricky questions of ethics, suffering and representation fascinate me.”

One of his interactive digital projects is an African Conflict Map, showing over 94000 instances of conflict events across Africa in the past 14 years and allowing users to browse conflict event data.

For light relief Richard has taken to baking, in particular Guinness chocolate cakes. “Maybe it’s a diversion from thesis writing or from living and studying in the UK at this very strange moment in the political history of the country,” he says. “Watching the practical implosion of reasoned democracy and the emergence of a strange form of nostalgia for the days of empire is unsettling for someone who grew up in South Africa and has since spent much of his life reading about what colonial domination actually looked like.”

He adds that there is an uneasiness in the UK now, “in the sense of not really having a clue what the UK might look like in two months’ time, let alone in two years’ time. In a world of Trumpian, Brexit shocks, it’s also a strange feeling to be questioning the notion that the arc of history bends to justice, to paraphrase King’s famous quote. Having grown up through the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of apartheid, and the progressive realisation of sexual rights in many countries, it’s a reminder, I suppose, that nothing is inevitable. Except perhaps that the sun will rise.

“Every winter up north, I miss the sun. Blue skies, and Johannesburg’s very specific, wrath-of-god thunderstorms in the evenings are things I’ve come to miss a lot. I have very fond memories of falling asleep on the wooden benches outside the Cullen Library on lazy afternoons. Then reluctantly awakening from this warm reverie to get to classes in what was then Senate House.”

By Heather Dugmore