#BISA2025 keynote recording: Professor Roland Bleiker - Seeing and sensing world politics

The #BISA2025 conference keynote was ‘Seeing and sensing world politics’ by Professor Roland Bleiker. This year's keynote was recorded as a lasting memento from the 50th anniversary conference, and you can watch the video below.

Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, where he coordinates a Visual Politics Research Program. Roland’s research explores how images and emotions shape political phenomena, including humanitarianism, security, peacebuilding, protest movements and the conflict in Korea.  His current main project is an interdisciplinary collaboration on Visualising Humanitarianism, involving several partner organisations, including the ICRC and the World Press Photo Foundation. Roland’s books include Visual Global Politics (Routledge, 2018); Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012); Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005/2008) and Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (CUP, 2000). 

Roland grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He studied international relations in Paris, Seoul, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Roland also worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in the Korean DMZ and held visiting affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.