In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a speech to the German parliament in response to and denunciation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Describing the moment as a ‘turning point’, Scholz referred to Putin’s act of aggression as a watershed moment that altered geopolitical reality and announced a volte-face in Germany’s defence and energy policies. This conference adopts the contemporary moment, which also sees the reality and spectre of armed conflict across many parts of the Global South, as an inflection point for reconsidering representations of war across a range of screen media: from narrative cinema to moving image installation; streaming to VR. 

Albert Einstein famously told the world that time is relative, and theorists from various fields–including children’s literature and disability studies–continue to grapple with what that means for lived experience. Children’s literature (and childhood studies more broadly) scholars examine how societies believe young people move through time towards adulthood, leading to theories of developmentalism and stages of childhood (like Piaget’s). Conversely, disability scholars explore what has been termed crip time: the kind of time experienced by people whose disabilities mean that they engage with the world at a different pace than normative time.