Workshop “Key Words of War” Implemented for Youth within “Researchers’ Night 2025”

Within the framework of “Researchers’ Night 2025,” Liene Ozoliņa and Maija Spuriņa, Leading Researchers at the LAC Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, together with researcher Iveta Ķešāne and research assistants Eva Marhileviča and Sabīne Ozola, invited young people to participate in the workshop “Key Words of War”.

During the session, participants were introduced to the first findings of the study “Preparing for War: Meanings of War in Public Discourse and Youth Perception in Latvia”, focusing on the representation of war in Latvian public discourse. They explored how the media frame young people’s military skills and knowledge through symbolic codes such as “readiness”, “freedom”, “masculinity”, “security”, and “patriotism”, among others.

In the interactive segment of the event, participants selected images they associated with security and national defence and collaboratively created a “war keyword cloud”, engaging in discussion about differing meanings and interpretations.
Event programme (in Latvian): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-
msF8sRQ8lNRxQ2vC-TFnWA6U99UdAce/view