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, 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.
Regional Conference Event
— Talk
Truth amid wartime; “disinformation”, propaganda and investigative journalism
In this lecture drawn from one of one of his Syria investigations, James Harkin tells the story of how difficult it is to get to the truth in modern warfare, and why genuinely independent investigative journalism is more important than ever.
Summer Conference Event
— Keynote
Patricia Devlin: Investigating Crime and Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland
Patricia Devlin’s investigations into crime and paramilitarism in post-Troubles Northern Ireland have left her with powerful enemies on all sides. At the CIJ she talks about how to investigate in sometimes hostile territory, and how to deal with the abuse and intimidation that follows.
Summer Conference Event
— Gavin MacFadyen Memorial Lecture
José María Irujo: How the CIA Spied on Assange
José María Irujo, senior staff writer and investigative reporter for El País, comes to London and the CIJ to deliver the annual Gavin MacFadyen memorial lecture. He will detail his explosive allegations about the CIA’s alleged capture of a private security firm whose job was to protect the Ecuadorian Embassy and Assange himself.
Summer Conference Event
— Welcome
#CIJSummer 2022 – Welcome
A warm welcome from our Director James Harkin and Becky Gardiner, Senior Lecturer and co-convenor of the MA in Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Regional Conference Event
— Keynote
Keynote: Chris Moore
From the Kincora rape scandal to priests protected by the Catholic Church to the strange alliances which emerged at the close of the Troubles to bury the secrets of the murky intelligence war, Chris Moore talks about how investigative journalism worked among the Northern Irish conflict, and the enemies ranged against it.
Regional Conference Event
— Welcome
Welcome & About the CIJ
Join us for a light lunch as we begin the afternoon with a short introduction about the work of the CIJ.
Summer Conference Event
— Welcome
#CIJSummer Welcome
Director James Harkin‘s welcome message to #CIJSummer Conference 2021. He was joined by Reuters reporter and head of #CIJMasterclass programme, who launched #CIJMasterclass 2021.
Summer Conference Event
Welcome to #CIJSummer 2021
Welcome to the 19th annual #CIJSummer Investigative Journalism Conference – the second, and almost certainly the last, to take place entirely online. Working throughout a global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone, not least for investigative journalists and those working to help them.
Summer Conference Event
— Keynote Talk
Gavin MacFadyen Memorial Lecture: Wa Lone
In 2017, Wa Lone, a journalist in Myanmar for Reuters, was arrested with his colleague Kyaw Soe Oo while reporting on military abuses of the Rohingya people in Rakhine State. Their ordeal included eighteen months in prison; for their investigation, they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2019.
Source Protection Programme Event
— Masterclass
Protecting sources under repressive regimes with Omar Mohammed (Mosul Eye)
(90 mins) 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST This masterclass is a conversation with Omar Mohammed, author of the Mosul Eye blog which documented life under ISIS rule in Iraq’s second city on how to protect your investigations from the prying eyes of repressive authoritarian regimes.
Source Protection Programme Event
— Discussion Keynote
Introduction to the Source Protection Programme
(90 mins) 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST This introductory session will feature a welcome from CIJ Director James Harkin and Freedom of the Press Executive Director Trevor Timm, as well as a special discussion between Jessica Bruder and Laura Poitras moderated by James Marcus.
Symposium Event
— Keynote Panel
Opening Session
This is the opening session of this year's event and includes: Opening remarks from Richard Logan, President of The Reva & David Logan Foundation. A Keynote from Hatice Cengiz. The Opening Plenary session with James Harkin, Edwy Plenel, Jen Robinson and Christophe Deloire.
Symposium Event
— Panel
Investigating Islamism
How far should a journalist go when it comes to investigating radical Islamism, and what are the dangers? What methods work best - undercover reporting online, the interpretation of documents, social media analysis, documentary or on-the-ground reporting?
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 for her story about government plans to increase surveillance of the Australian people. All charges against Smethurst have since been 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.
