James Harkin
James Harkin is the director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
He is a journalist who covers social change and political conflict and whose work appears in Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ, The Smithsonian, Prospect and the Guardian. A former director of talks at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), he once taught politics at Oxford University, and was associate producer on Adam Curtis’s two BBC series The Trap and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. He’s been reporting on the Syrian conflict from all sides. His last book, Hunting Season, an investigative account of the rise of the Islamic State group and its campaign of kidnapping journalists, was published in November 2015 by Little, Brown in the UK and Hachette in the US.
Summer Conference Event
— Talk
The Source and the Surveillance: Annika Smethurst on committing acts of journalism
In June 2019 federal police raided NewsCorp journalist Annika Smethurt’s home and seized material over her story about government plans for greater surveillance the Australian people. All charges against Smethurst have since dropped; the raid appears to have been a naked attempt to uncover her source.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
Reporting and The Surveillance State
Richard Norton-Taylor, veteran, much-garlanded national security reporter and author of The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain, came (virtually) to the CIJ for an informal conversation with CIJ Director James Harkin about his experience as a reporter for the Guardian and the challenges faced by investigative journalists, the development of the national security state and the pace of its surveillance apparatus, and, after his pioneering work on verbatim theatre, the crucial importance of new kinds of documentary storytelling.
Regional Conference Event
Welcome address
Welcome and Introduction to the project and the work of the CIJ with James Harkin, Director of the CIJ
Summer Conference Event
— Talk
Can Dündar: Arrest, Escape and Exile.
Can Dündar will deliver our annual Gavin MacFadyen Memorial Lecture. Can Dündar is a distinguished Turkish journalist with over 40 years of experience writing, editing and making investigative documentaries.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
Dame Frances Cairncross: Can government rescue journalism?
In February 2019, The Cairncross Review published its long-awaited recommendations to protect high-quality, public interest news: tax relief to support local news and investigative journalism, a new Institute for Public Interest News overseeing an innovation fund, fresh obligations on Google and Facebook to promote trust in the information they disseminate.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
Srećko Horvat: What should subversives do?
Amid the rise of populism and surveillance apparatuses and the fragility of liberal democracies, what does it mean to be subversive in the contemporary era? Srećko Horvat, one of the most exciting new radical philosophers, came to the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) to argue for the value of a genuinely subversive journalism and a fresh kind of radical internationalism.
Talks and Screenings
— CIJxICA Talks
Closed Circuit: Disinformation
The CIJ and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) present Closed Circuit, a series of broadcast discussions on the status of information in the age of digital media. Bringing together figures from the worlds of journalism, politics, media theory and the arts, the series spans state-sponsored propaganda, ‘fake news’, revised histories, and the role of non-disclosure agreements and whistle-blowers in the shaping of public perceptions.
Symposium Event
— Panel
White Helmets And Black-ops: The Propaganda Wars Over Syria
With the Syrian conflict in its 8th year, the propaganda on all sides grows ever more intense, never more so than in the barrage of conflicting narratives about the role of The White Helmets. Are they a volunteer organisation working to rescue Syrians on all sides, a propaganda front for Western governments or allies of Al-Qaeda?
Symposium Event
— Panel
Reporting The Troubles: Then and Now
From official British censorship during the Troubles to the “chilling effect” involved in navigating the peace, getting to the truth about the conflict in Northern Ireland has never been easy, and may even be growing more difficult.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
Lawrence Wright: Reporting as craft
Pulitzer-prize winner Lawrence Wright’s career as a staff writer for The New Yorker has taken him from in-depth, narrative reporting of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to developments within America’s neglected heartlands.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
Seymour Hersh: A Life in investigative journalism
Seymour Hersh is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of Reporter: A Memoir. From his reports on the massacre at My Lai, to his exposure of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, to his attempts to get to the bottom of the circumstances of Osama Bin Laden’s death and the conflict in Syria, Seymour Hersh has over five decades made a reputation as one of the world’s most acclaimed investigative journalists.
Talks and Screenings
— #LOGANCIJ
The death of Khashoggi and the reach of surveillance regimes
What can the death of Jamal Khashoggi tell us about the sophisticated machinery of surveillance in the Gulf, Turkey and beyond? David Kirkpatrick, who investigated the Khashoggi case for The New York Times, in conversation with Matthew Hedges.
