ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what cultural artefacts means for disciplinary practice when people bring these artefacts into their research programs. The mutability of digital representations and the circumstances of their production and circulation raise interesting questions about the authorship and authenticity of the artefacts people research. The chapter outlines the conventions of knowledge production in the discipline of international relations and interrogate the disciplinary emphasis on evidence-based argument that organises how people conceive of validity or credibility in research. The chapter engages with the dismissal of Brian Walski, former staff photographer at the L. A. Times covering the Iraq war. It discusses a photograph that circulated widely on social media in 2014, showing a child sleeping between two grave-like mounds of stones. The chapter explores the implications of a turn to digital culture in terms of the effect that such a turn might have on disciplinary conceptualisations of authenticity and the subject of the author in processes of knowledge production.
