Bette Dam

The doctoral research of Bette Dam aims to address and to change the narratives of contemporary war journalism. While reporting on the war on terror, most western journalists rely on the reports of international news organisations, thus solely presenting the dominant narrative of the US army or allies of the US. Dam’s goal is to correct this problem by developing a practical tool-kit which will help journalists to construct their narrative using the different sources in a critical manner. To this end, she is rewriting news texts with her students, searching for strategies to actively interrogate the way the genre is practiced today. Thanks to her experience as a war correspondent, she has a unique insight in how both intratextual and extratextual properties define the news narratives. Another objective of Bette Dam’s project is to imbue war journalism with a postcolonial sensibility to represent countries, cultures and individuals more correctly.