The role of citizens’ affective media practices in participatory warfare during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

This article, grounded in virtual ethnographic observations during the first sixteen months of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, examines the role of personal stories, testimonies, and other communicative acts of Ukrainian social media users in the digital realm, their place in the process of knowledge production, and the value and authority they hold in the context of participatory warfare. Drawing on the notions of ‘affective publics’ [Papacharissi in Inf Commun Soc 19(3):307–324, 2016] and ‘media practices’ [Mattoni and Treré in Commun Theory 24(3):252–271, 2014], I reflect on how such affective media practices are strategically enacted, articulated, and circulated by Ukrainians in the networked spaces of war and how they interact with high-level state war narratives and traditional expert commentary that tend to dominate wartime knowledge production. I argue that personalized, reflexive, embodied, socially situated knowledge, and lived experiences of war shared on social media can act as forms of resistance, while also redefining the meaning of expertise in wartime and centring citizen voices in the hybrid media sphere.